i 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



CfRt, -- ^JjM? 

T 5^ 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THIS GOODLY FRAME 
THE EARTH 



STRA Y IMPRESSIONS OF SCENES, INCIDENTS 
AND PERSONS IN A JOURNEY TOUCHING 
JAPAN, CHINA, EGYPT, PALESTINE 
AND GREECE 



BY 

FRANCIS TIFFANY 




Copyright, 1895, 
By FRANCIS TIFFANY. 

All rights reserved. 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton and Company. 



To 

EDWIN B. HASKELL 



To you] dear Friend, I gratefully dedicate these few out of 
the countless happy experiences we shared on our trip round 
the world. 

FRANCIS TIFFANY 



CONTENTS 



GETTING UNDER WEIGH 

PAGE 



I. Providing* Funds for Travel ..... 1 

II. Across the American Continent . ... 2 

III. The Action of Wheat on Imagination ... 8 

IV. The Rockies 4 

V. The Pacific Ocean 6 

VI. Linguistic Privileges ....... 8 

VII. Arriving out ........ 9 

JAPAN 
I. 

I. First Impressions .13 

II. The Promotion of Domestic Happiness ... 14 

III. Yokohama 15 

IV. Japanese Women 18 

V. The Japanese Smile 20 

VI. The Curio Fever 23 

VII. Straws 25 

II. 

I. The Rice Lands 21 

II. Kamakura 28 

III. The Buddha 30 

IV. Back to the Finite 34 

V. The Philosopher's Perch 36 

III. 

I. Miyanoshita and the Hakone District ... 42 

II. Rice as Motive Power . , .- . . . 42 



vi 



CONTENTS 



III. Bamboo Grass ........ 43 

IV. The Fujiya Hotel 44 

V. Volcanoes and Personal Cleanliness .... 45 

VL The Ten Province Pass ...... 46 

IV. 

I. An Historical Glimpse ...... 48 

II. The Nikko Groves ....... 51 

III. The Nikko Temples ....... 53 

IV. Popular Use of the Temples .. „ . . . . 56 
V. Simplicity of Japanese Civilization .... 58 

VI. Japanese Bells ....... 60 

V. 

I. Japanese Manners . . . . . . . 63 

II. Japanese Heroic Moral Standards .... 68 

VI. * 

I. Source in Nature of Japanese Art .... 72 

II. Variety in Unity 74 

III. Broad Influence of Japanese Art .... 78 

IV. Physical Conditions affecting Art .... 79 

VII. 

I. The Question of Missions 82 

II. The Buddhist Keaction ...... 86 

VIII. 

I. The Scientific Broomstick-Drudge .... 89 

II. The Crusading Spirit 92 

III. The Day of the Pacific Ocean 94 

IV. Good-By to Japan ....... 95 

CHINA 
I. 

I. At Sea again 97 

II. Consistent Conservatism 97 

III. World Building ........ 101 



CONTENTS vii 

IV. So near, and yet so far ! 101 

V. Inside the Walls 104 

VI. Out into the Country 105 

VII. The Handwriting on the Wall . . . . 8 108 

II. 

I. Hong Kong 110 

II. Canton River 113 

III. Canton's River Population 115 

IV. Business and Religion . . . . . 116 

V. TheShamien 117 

VI. Inside Canton 119 

VII. Canton's Examination Halls 122 

VIII. A Government of Philosophers ..... 126 

THE TROPICS 

I. Away from Hong Kong 135 

II. Tropical Yearnings 136 

III. Singapore 137 

IV. A School for Sculptors 139 

V. A Ravishing Drive 141 

VI. The Botanical Garden 143 

VII. A Borneo Philosopher 144 

CEYLON 

I. The Culmination of the Tropics .... 149 
II. Blood thicker than Water 151 

IH. Kandy 152 

IV. Christmas in Kandy 154 

V. The Peradeniya Botanical Gardens . . . 158 

VI. An International Ecclesiastical Interview . . . 159 

INDIA 
I. 

I. Pondicherry 163 

II. The Hoogly . . 165 

IH. Darjeeling 166 

IV. Again Mongolians ! 169 



viii CONTENTS 

V. The Apotheosis of Machinery 170 

VI. At Last the Himalayas ! 174 

VII. Tiger Hill ........ 176 

VIII. The Alps and the Himalayas 178 

II. 

I. Calcutta 180 

II. How Empires fall . . . . . . .182 

III. Hindu Traits ... . . . . . 183 

III. 

I. Benares . 186 

II. Street Scenes ........ 187 

III. The Ghats 189 

IV. Burning the Dead 190 

V. Sati, or Widow-Burning 192 

IV. 

I. Lucknow 195 

II. The Siege of Lucknow ...... 197 

III. Cawnpore 199 

V. 

I. Oriental Savings-Banks 204 

II. Happy or Miserable ? . . . . 206 

III. Reaction from Bad Example 209 

IV. Gaudium Certaminis . . . . . . 212 

VI. 

I. A Glance at History 215 

II. Eliminating the Tartar ...... 217 

III. India's Alhambra at Agra 220 

IV. Woman in the Evolution of Architecture . . 223 
V. The Oasis 225 

VI. The Taj Mahal . 227 

VII. 

I. Delhi 232 



CONTENTS ix 
VIII. 

I. Jeypore ......... 238 

II. An Elephant Ride to Amber 241 

III. Mt. Abu 245 

IV. Ahmedabad 251 

EGYPT 
I. 

I. Prelude to Egypt . . . . . . . 255 

II. Semitic Prophets . . , , . . . 257 

III. The Desert 260 

IV. Ismailia 262 

V. The Land of the Rod 264 

II. 

I. A Study in Egyptian Babies ..... 267 

II. Nile Hints .269 

III. The Gizeh Pyramids . 272 

IV. Memphis and the Sakkarah Pyramids . . . 277 

V. Knight-Errants of the Shovel ..... 281 
VI. The Tomb of Thi 284 

• 

in. 

I. Characteristics of Nile Scenery ..... 288 

II. Pantheistic Animism 290 

III. The Later Tombs of Egypt 294 

IV. The Temples of Egypt .302 

PALESTINE 

I. De Lesseps building better than he knew . .311 

II. Jaffa 312 

III. Jaffa to Jerusalem 313 

IV. Sacred Cities 317 

V. In what Frame of Mind ? 318 

VI. A Stroll to Bethlehem 322 

VII. The Church of the Nativity 324 

VIII. The Spirit and the Flesh 325 

IX. The Jews' Wailing-Place 327 

X. The Dead Sea and the Jordan .... 329 



CONTENTS 



BAALBEC AND DAMASCUS 



I. Beyrout and the Lebanon Ranges .... 335 

II. Baalbee . .338 

III. Damascus 339 

ASIA MINOR AND GREECE 

I. The Sail to Smyrna ...... 347 

II. Smyrna 348 

III. Constantinople ....... 351 

IV. First Introduction to Attica ..... 351 
V. The Parthenon 353 

VI. Eleusis . 357 

VII. Marathon ....... . 359 

VIII. Athens' Parting Benediction . 360 



THIS GOODLY FRAME 
THE EARTH 



GETTING UNDER WEIGH 

^ Parsons or otherwise, large numbers of the 
impecunious stoutly aver that they, too, 
would be glad of a trip round the world, were it not 
for the cost of the thing. This is no valid excuse. 
It need not cost one a penny, nay, on the contrary, 
prove the happiest means of escape from the outlay 
one is subjected to by staying prosaically at home. 

"What is the paradoxical fellow driving at?" 
will be the natural outcry. Well, at a statement of 
the plainest matter of fact. Nothing further is 
requisite than to drop in unexpectedly of an even- 
ing at the house of a generous-hearted friend, — 
one of the kind who, having freely received, loves 
freely to give, — and then and there to have your 
breath taken away by his sudden exclamation, u I 
want to go round the world, and I want you to go 
with me ! Say yes, and it shall not cost you a yen, 
a rupee, or a piastre." 

In a flash start up before the mind's eye snow- 
crowned Fujisan in Japan, with all the Hima- 
layan giants from Mt. Everest to Kunchinjinga, 



2 GETTING UNDER WEIGH 



thundering with the voices of their united ava- 
lanches, " Take up with him on the spot ! " In 
gentler notes, the same is caressingly murmured 
by the waves of the Indian Ocean, lapsing on the 
roseate, palm-encircled beaches of Ceylon. Finally, 
from out the mysterious depths of the halls of 
mighty Karnak breathes an echo as from the 
remotest ages, " Ephemeral child of the brand-new 
Columbia of to-day ! not a mummy in Egypt but 
would leap to burst his cerements of cloth and 
bitumen, and cry 4 Amen ! ' at such an offer." 

It is, then, a distinct pleasure, before proceeding, 
to record the impressions of travel that ensued; 
thus, by so simple a suggestion, to smooth the 
elsewise rugged way for others, — impecunious 
perhaps in purse, but millionaires on scenery, 
architecture, and the metaphysical abysses of Orien- 
tal Theosophy. 

^ Before visiting foreign lands, it is said to 
be a good thing to know a little of one's own, 
so as not to mistake a chance wheelbarrow one may 
light on in Timbuctoo for an entirely novel inven- 
tion, and so write home in too naive a strain of 
enthusiasm. Certainly, in crossing the American 
Continent to embark for Japan, one has a chance 
to see a good deal of his own native land, as well 
as — if he mean to sail from Vancouver — of the 
Canadian Dominion. 

It is, perhaps, well enough to pass over the 
scenes of absorbing interest that lie on the route 
between Boston and St. Paul. The perils and 



ACTION OF WHEAT ON IMAGINATION 3 



fatigues of the same journey have been undergone 
by previous explorers, — notably by Lewis and 
Clark, and later by General Fremont, — who have 
recorded their topographical impressions inch by 
inch. So to plunge at once into unknown realms ! 

Ill letting away at nightfall from St. Paul, 
Minnesota, one awakens the next morning 
to find himself afloat on a boundless ocean of wheat 
lands. The assertion of men of science that if, 
undistracted by sharks and horse-mackerel, the 
codfish had a free chance to rear to a marriageable 
age all the sprightly young fry they spawn, they 
would in ten years pack the Atlantic solid with 
cod, has here become outright demonstration in 
wheat. As one rolls along through South Dakota, 
North Dakota, Manitoba, and beyond, a horrible 
nightmare of wheat is begotten in the imagination. 
All the dread monotony is experienced of a sys- 
tem of " solitary confinement " in wheat. Now, the 
word of Sacred Writ demonstrates its awful truth, 
" Man shall not live by bread alone," as, phy- 
sically and mentally congested with wheat, one 
feels his gorge fairly rising at the thought of 
swallowing a crumb of a roll or a cracker. As 
well offer a man dying of thirst in the Sahara 
desert a tumblerful of sand instead of water ! 

Nor is this all. With equal oppression is imagi- 
nation drowned, as in an elevator bin, in its every 
struggle to picture the lives of the inhabitants of 
such a farinaceous region. Of course they marry 
and are given in marriage. Lovely young maidens 



4 GETTING UNDER WEIGH 



are led to the altar ; but between the mind and every 
image of the charming scene is interposed a thick 
mist of " Bridal Veil " flour. No ! it is vain to 
struggle further with the wheat hallucination. 
Just as dolls are stuffed with bran, so the baffled 
traveler finally succumbs to the delusion that, 
should he tap a vein in the arm of one of the 
natives, there would flow forth, not a stream of 
ruddy human blood, but a stream of A No. 1 Pills- 
bury's best. 

^ " It is wisely ordained," says Goethe, " that 
the trees shall not grow up into the skies." 
Only roll along far enough over the dead-level prai- 
ries, and at last is vouchsafed to weary man a rain- 
bow of promise that not even the waters of wheat 
shall continuously prevail over the face of the earth. 
Faint indications begin to attest that, in the 
geological " struggle for life," a perpendicular as 
well as a horizontal, a jackscrew as well as a flat- 
iron principle is at work in nature. Hurrah ! a 
hill as high as a woodchuck's burrow. It is big 
with prophecy of the Rocky Mountains. Vaster 
throes of an earth in labor succeed, and bring 
forth, — is it a huge barn ? No ; a veritable Alp 
as big as a barn. One is startled at the sub- 
terranean energies involved. But, so far, all is 
but prelude. Tired of dead level, Nature finally 
rises a sleep-refreshed giant, heaving up, first on 
knotty knees and then on his mighty shoulders, 
the cumbering bedclothes of the prairies, with an 
air of " It 's time to get up ! " What a Titan of a 



THE ROCKIES 



5 



fellow is stirring at last, becomes in a few hours 
revealed. 

Before I actually saw theni, I never could get a 
vivid conception of the essential genius of the 
Rocky Mountains, — at any rate as displayed 
along the line of the Canadian Pacific Railroad. 
People are forever darkening counsel by compari- 
sons that serve merely to show what a thing is not. 
Switzerland has towering mountains ; therefore as 
the Rocky Mountains tower, they are the American 
Switzerland. In point of fact, they are the precise 
counterpart of Switzerland. The Rocky Mountains 
are, as their name implies, the Hockies, just as 
the Alps are what their name — the Alpen, the 
high pasture slopes — implies. In Switzerland 
the snow-line descends four or five thousand feet 
lower than here, and so secures superb expanses of 
snowclad flanks and peaks. Then, below the line 
of softest ermine, succeed enormous stretches of 
emerald green grass-lands, dotted with herds of 
cattle. Demand this of the Rockies, and they 
will flatly answer : " Under such a dazzling sun 
we cannot keep on our snowcaps ; and, as for your 
deep-uddered Swiss kine, their milk would dry up 
here in a day. But take us as we are, and we defy 
Switzerland to parallel us." 

The Rockies are right. Such Titanic sublimity 
of rock formations, such wrestlings and writhings 
of uptilted and contorted strata, such spectacle of 
a vast rock creation groaning and travailing in pain 
until now, where else is it witnessed on so stupen- 
dous a scale ? Now, in the Alps, all this elemental 



6 



GETTING UNDER WEIGH. 



convulsion of nature, this Titan reign of chaos, is 
largely veiled from sight. It is covered with per- 
petual snow ; it is hidden under regal mantles of 
green. Here the Titan is naked, — " naked and 
not ashamed." His gigantic osseous structure, his 
thews and sinews, all that constitute him Briareus, 
are seen in violent action. These are his boast, 
his glory. " What went ye out into the wilderness 
for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment?" 
Such is the burden of this John the Baptist moun- 
tain dispensation. 

People may quarrel, if they will, that Michael 
Angelo is not Raphael, or Dante, Petrarch. For 
one, I find it much wiser to enjoy both types of 
men and mountains. So, thank God for the 
Rockies ! 

^ It is a great experience to set sail, or, more 
literally, to begin to twirl propeller from 
Vancouver. Before reaching the open ocean, one 
carries with him for twenty-four hours superb 
mountain ranges ; on the right gradually trending 
northward to Alaska, and on the left southward 
toward the State of Washington, Mt. Baker loom- 
ing up in the far distance 15,000 feet in height. 
Then, too, how soothing to qualmy stomachs the 
thought that the vast ocean on which one is em- 
barking has earned for itself so mild and pacific a 
name. " What 9 s in a name ? " A vast deal, pro- 
vided its bearer lives up to it. On the other hand, 
how small mitigation is it of a sentence to rack 
and thumb-screws, that it emanates from a raging 



THE PACIFIC OCEAN 



7 



tyrant habitually addressed as His Serene High- 
ness ! Equally true does all this hold of oceans. 

To be perfectly candid, the Pacific is as fully 
entitled to the benefit of an alias as any poor incon- 
sistent human creature whom dire necessity compels 
to alternate between roles as divergent as those of 
exemplary deacon of the church in one place and 
disreputable gambler or horse thief in another. It 
got its Serene Highness title from the early voy- 
agers, who, after a six weeks struggle to round Cape 
Horn, amid a whirl of gales, sleet, hail, fog, and 
distracted albatrosses, at last made northing enough 
to reach the beatific realm of the trade winds, and 
then, — sky-scrapers, studding-sails, everything set, 
— to be wafted day after day over a summer sea 
that by contrast seemed heaven. Rejoicingly as 
Dante, when escaped from the terrors of Inferno, 
could they now sing, " To run over better waters 
the little vessel of my genius now hoists its sails, 
and leaves behind itself a sea so cruel. ... A soft 
color of oriental sapphire which was gathered in 
the serene aspect of the air, pure even to the hori- 
zon, renewed delight to my eyes soon as I issued 
from the dead air that had afflicted my eyes and 
my breast. The fair planet which incites to love 
was making all the Orient to smile." 

" O widowed northern region, since thou art 
deprived of beholding these ! " is the continuation 
of Dante's strain more befitting those who sail from 
the high latitude of Vancouver, — at least as a gen- 
eral rule. The voyage is run on the short circle, 
close enough to the Aleutian Islands to let one see 



8 GETTING UNDER WEIGH. 



now and then what a heaven on earth they must 
provide for gulls, seals, and walruses. None the 
less, so far as we were concerned, all the way across 
tb Yokohama the Pacific lived up to its inviting 
name. People there are, of course, in whom the sub- 
jective element so preponderates over the objective, 
that they will get seasick under any conditions. 
But there was really no external justification of 
their conduct. With such a superb steamship as 
the " Empress of China," with such an unspeak- 
able green and gold dragon breathing defiance from 
her bow, with the privilege of two smoke-stacks, two 
propellors, two hulls, admirable fare, and almond- 
eyed Chinese waiters in long blue robes and pig- 
tails, it was nothing short of deep-dyed ingratitude 
to turn up the nose In nauseated disgust. 

Bound, as we were, for the Orient, there 

V A. 

was in these Chinese servants, — gliding to 
and fro in their felt slippers like silent ghosts, 
their flowing robes gently undulating and their 
pigtails swaying in harmonious concert, — an 
element of Arabian Night enchantment hard to 
describe. We felt in it our first gentle plucking 
back, our initial weaning from the brimming breasts 
of the Occident at which hitherto we had drawn 
our sole ethnological nutrition ; an initial weaning 
very grateful, it must be admitted, from the long- 
wonted realm of split trousers, creaking boots, 
bleached-out skins, and eye£ devoid of that furtive 
side-glance that seems to look all round and behind 
an object. 



ARRIVING OUT 



9 



Besides, from a purely linguistic point of view, 
these Orientals furnished a university-extension 
course in philology that was a liberal education in 
itself. On first going abroad, my friend and I 
were guiltless of a Chinese word. Yet scarcely 
had we been a day at sea before we could ask for 
oxtail soup, curried rice, fillet of beef, or pistachio- 
nut ice-cream ; yes, and what was more to the pur- 
pose, without fail get them. 

Spite of all that may be urged by pedants, bent 
on glorifying their own attainments, Chinese is not 
a difficult tongue to master, — at any rate under 
the Meisterschaft system practiced on board the 
Vancouver steamships. The scheme is beautiful 
in its simplicity. For example, ox-tail soup is 
merely No. 1, curried rice No. 2, fillet of beef No. 3, 
and so on and on to the end of the bill of fare. 
All that is needful is to call out the requisite num- 
ber, and presto ! the dish smokes on the table. Thus, 
as by a wave of an enchanter's wand, is dissipated 
in an instant the whole baleful fog of linguistic 
confusion precipitated on the world by the defiant 
impiety of the projectors of the Babylonian Tower. 
American, Frenchman, Chinese, Hindoo, every man 
hears his fellow speaking in his own tongue in 
which he was born. 

VII ^ e were thirteen days on the passage, and 
yet on going down into the engine-room, the 
night before our arrival out, it was a startling sur- 
prise to find that the ship's screws had not yet made 
a million revolutions. Night and day, without an 



10 GETTING UNDER WEIGH 



instant's intermission, had the mighty hearts of the 
engines been throbbing, and not yet a million pul- 
sations recorded. No finite mind can frame a con- 
ception of what a million means, say the greatest 
mathematicians. Now I felt it. J ay Gould, with 
his seventy millions, dilated in my mind to truly 
astronomic and cosmic immensity. 

The day before our arrival, it rained. Should 
we, then, have rain and mist to blot out the glori- 
ous spectacle of the sail into Yokohama bay ? Only 
this once on our whole voyage had our steam siren 
been kept sounding for fog, making us then per- 
fectly comprehend why Ulysses plugged with wax 
the ears of his crew when the other siren lifted her 
sweet voice from the rocks. No ! It could not be 
that we were doomed to chilly drizzle and to a blot- 
ting-paper atmosphere soaking up all the delicate 
outlines of the coast. Nor was it so. A glorious 
sunrise transfigured sky, sea, and land ; and, lo ! in 
ideal beauty of proportion, from cone to base, stood 
out snow-crowned Fujisan, lording it all over 
Japan. Oh, the beatitude of volcanic forces, when 
they eventuate in such a miracle of beauty ! Tamer 
and more prosaic than the man who knows no fiery 
passions is the land that knows no earthquakes. 
Who, with a soul of poetry in him, would not 
gladly see some adjacent county of Worcester torn 
from its rooted foundations and lifted 12,000 feet 
nearer heaven than it ever stood before, to secure 
from his own windows the daily vision of such a 
joy forever ? 

By nine A. M. we were at our moorings, and soon 



ARRIVING OUT 



11 



surrounded by scores of sampans eager to take 
passengers ashore. As the radiant September 
morning was warm, and the competitive sculling 
with huge sweeps, of the most vigorous kind, clothes 
soon came to be felt unbearable. Not that, to be- 
gin with, the boatmen had much on. But now in 
a trice that little came off, to a mere loin-cloth. 
What an intoxicating feast of backs and chests, and 
loins and legs, developed by a lifetime of stand-up 
rowing! iEsthetically exhilarating was the sight, 
as though all the statues in the Vatican — Apollo, 
Hermes, Antinous, Ganymede — had suddenly 
leaped down from their pedestals and taken to 
sculling sampans. Only, instead of white marble, 
their bodies were of gold bronze. 

Satan's malign work in the Garden of Eden it 
was that first suggested clothes. Not yet have 
Japanese boatmen given in to the shamefaced, 
guilty dogma. So, devoutly be it hoped that no 
misguided missionaries will feel bound in con- 
science to make a point of the obnoxious tenet, — 
at least for sculler-converts. 



JAPAN 
I. 

j No traveller ever knows so much about a 
new country, — its race characteristics, its 
institutions, its art, literature, and religion, — as 
during his first three days stay there, or before he 
has had time to pick up enough of the language to 
say good morning. It is a pity, then, to let the 
world lose the benefit of his first intuitive divina- 
tions. 

Perhaps there is a certain occult irony in the fact 
that one's earliest innocent impressions of Japan 
are gathered from his perch on the seat of a two- 
wheeled adult baby carriage called a jinrikisha, in 
which a male Japanese drags him round, instead 
of, as in his previous infancy, a Hibernian lassie, 
and that, too, at a pace befitting the greater hardi- 
hood of his time of life. If of a philosophic cast of 
mind, one's first speculations naturally turn on the 
comparative advantages, as an instrument of pro- 
pulsion, of a man or a horse. The conclusion is 
entirely in favor of the man. The horse is a brute ; 
the man is a rational being. The horse shies or 
runs away ; the man does neither. The horse is in- 
capable of conversation ; the man is at once guide, 
philosopher, and friend. Serene contemplation 
and active driving are incompatible, as is witnessed 



14 



JAPAN 



in the biographies of so many philosophers who 
have run over countless children, smashed the 
vehicles of other people, and ended off with break- 
ing their own necks. To see a country to profit, 
one needs to give the rein to his own free fancy and 
not to the jaws of a brute beast. 

^ From his first day even in a foreign land 
the humane and enlightened traveler is 
eagerly on the lookout for fruitful ideas to carry 
back with him. He yearns that those who have to 
stay at home shall reap some benefit from his being 
happy enough to get away. Loud, then, was my 
Eureka of joy to find, in less than half an hour, 
that Japan had startled me with a suggestion which 
opened up visions of enhanced domestic bliss to 
millions in my native land. It took this shape. 
Bicycles are essentially anti-social and selfish insti- 
tutions. The only valid plea for them is that they 
develop the calves of the legs. But calf for calf, 
these Japanese runners would bear away the prize 
at every cattle-show in the country. What, then, 
if in America, tender, but straitened husbands, 
incapable of a horse and wagon, would but consent 
to abandon their selfish wheels and to brace their 
thews and sinews to the chivalrous work of treat- 
ing their delicate wives to frequent jinrikisha spins 
on the Brighton road ! Contrast with this the 
murderous adage about a chance to kill two birds 
with one stone! Here, at a stroke, is power to 
impart fresh health and joy to two loving mates, 
along with delightful associations of scenery and 



YOKOHAMA. 



15 



companionship that would perpetually endear them 
to one another. 

Let the next convention in the higher interests 
of woman take up seriously this weighty matter. 
Depend upon it, man will never be taught his 
rightful place in creation till put into the shafts 
and spurred on by duty and love to make his six 
miles an hour for the health and delectation of his 
better half. As to the future erection, in some 
great public park, of a statue smiling benignantly 
down on a thousand flying jinrikishas, and to 
which, as they speed by, happy wives and proud 
husbands look up with eyes brimful of gratitude, — 
be all that as it may ! 

^ Like all seaport towns, Yokohama presents 
an odd intermixture of native and foreign 
characteristics. Old and new Japan here jostle 
one another in the queerest fashion. At anchor in 
the harbor lie huge modern steamships and iron- 
clads, along with clumsy junks, — while, ashore, 
Chinese lanterns and electric lights, bare legs and 
stove-pipe hats, straw sandals and india-rubber 
boots, mingle in the most incongruous way. Here 
comes along a man in a rice-straw thatch of a 
cloak, suggestive of a porcupine in a partially qui- 
escent state, — his quills prone instead of erect with 
anger. As a device for shedding rain it is pecu- 
liarly effective, each separate straw serving as a 
distinct conductor. But the next man wears a 
cheap mackintosh. Incongruities like these might 
be multiplied to any extent. 



16 



JAPAN. 



There is a foreign resident as well as a purely 
Japanese quarter of the town. The first is built 
up with high, solid hotels, dwellings, and ware- 
houses, as a special invitation to earthquakes. 
Along its water line runs a broad boulevard called 
"The Bund," planted with trees, and commanding 
an entrancing view over the bay. The second, or 
Japanese quarter covers ten times the space with 
its low, story-and-a-half wood structures, chimney- 
less, cellar-less, and with the rounded corner posts 
set into grooved stone sockets, to admit, under 
earthquake shocks, of *a " bye-baby-bunting " 
oscillation that must be soothing to the feelings. 
The streets are entirely unpaved, so that in times 
of rain every man, — and the same law applies to 
women, — has to become a "pavement unto him- 
self " by wearing pattens, with cross pieces set 
underneath, that raise him two and three inches 
from the ground. For so short a people as the 
Japanese, this proves an immense enhancement in 
dignity of appearance, and in rainy weather they 
wear a truly imposing look. 

Certainly, to one accustomed to the brick and 
stone built cities of America and Europe, there is 
something in the first sight of a great, swarming 
beehive of a city made out of nothing but frail 
wood structures huddled close together, that is cal- 
culated to make him shudder at the thought of 
kerosene, and question how great the blessing our 
own country has conferred on Japan by sending 
out this especial form of missionary enlightenment. 
Earthquakes were bad enough, but earthquakes 



YOKOHAMA. 



17 



and kerosene, hand and glove with one another! 
For miles on miles stretch these low, wood struc- 
tures with no distinctive architectural feature but 
aboriginal Tartar roof, — a plain outgrowth of the 
primitive Tartar tent, — together with a capacity 
of lying all open to the public gaze unexampled 
elsewhere. 

Indeed, in Japan, the sliding-door principle 
reaches its acme. We at home know it merely as a 
means of practically throwing two rooms into one, 
while here the entire interior partitions of the house 
are all sliding doors, in the shape of screens 
covered with glazed paper. Add to this that the 
whole street front is daily taken off the house, and 
it will be clear at a glance that no other country in 
the world incites laudable curiosity to so rewarding 
a study of all that is going on in its shops, parlors, 
sleeping rooms, nurseries, and kitchens. So accus- 
tomed, indeed, are the mass of J apanese to living in 
public, as no longer to be conscious of the fact that 
they are in public. Having no contrast in their 
minds of the feeling of privacy, they are as perfectly 
at their ease under the eye of man as under the eye 
of the sun. Each man is thus shut up to establish- 
ing his own castle inside his own skin. It were a 
curious subject of investigation how much this per- 
petual living in public has had to do with the for- 
mation of a marvelously perfected external ceremo- 
nial type of manner, — very charming, very seduc- 
tive, no doubt — but which reveals no more of what 
is actually going on inside the man than the shell 
of a turtle reveals the emotions really agitating his 



18 



JAPAN 



troubled or peaceful spirit. Nature, after all, has 
a way of " getting even " with all kinds of circum- 
stances. 

None the less, Japan is the country of countries 
for watching the perpetual going on of the external 
comedy of human life. The curtain is always up 
and the play in lively progress. This is the first 
spell of fascination exercised on the spectator. In 
Europe and America, on the contrary, the reflective 
traveler is perpetually annoyed at being shut out 
by doors and blinds from any free study of the do- 
mestic life of the inmates. Should he steal up 
to a window and flatten his nose against the pane of 
glass, his conduct is deemed intrusive. But how 
else can he hope to gain adequate comprehension 
of the sacred seclusion of the English or German 
home ? Here, thank Heaven, one can quietly loaf, 
and, without discomposing husband, wife, or child, 
watch everything going on within, — yes, and very 
likely know just as much about it as he did before ! 

^ As for human beings, no sight at first makes 
so fascinating an impression on the new- 
comer in J apan as that of the young women. They 
are such dainty, miniature creatures, and wear such 
a guise of having just flitted down from the pretty 
pattern on a paper umbrella, that it is impossible 
to take them seriously as responsible beings. If 
a bevy of them laughingly sprang back on top of 
such an umbrella and re-grouped themselves into 
the original design, it would not surprise one a bit. 
A halo of perpetual child grace surrounds them. 



JAPANESE WOMEN 



19 



The pretty patterns of their robes, with wide-open- 
ing sleeves and gayly-flowered belts ; their shining 
black hair done up to last a week without re-dress- 
ing, and stuck through with gilt and enamel pins 
enough to hold it safe in a gale of wind; their 
golden yellow complexions shot through with a 
rosy blush ; their dainty figures and ever smiling 
eyes, all combine in a charming Pinafore picture 
that calls out the oddest kind of a half tender- 
father, half fond-lover feeling in the breast. Easily 
in prettily modified shape, revives the essence of 
the old Greek fable, — how some exquisitely artis- 
tic Pygmalion of a toy-maker, infatuated over the 
charm of one of his own daintiest productions, 
should have wrung from the gods the boon of 
power to make it actually breathe and live. 

Often at home we hear an infatuated parent say 
of his charming little girl of ten, " Oh that I could 
keep her as she is, and never have her grow a bit 
older or bigger ! " Well, here is the very thing 
before one's eyes, — the artless grace of childhood 
lingering on, spite of calendar, marriage, and 
motherhood. Yes ; but they are only playing at 
motherhood, as little girls play with dolls ; they 
surely cannot mean that you shall take the baby in 
earnest ! 

Such, — open to future correction — is one's 
first inevitable impression of these dainty creatures. 
Culture, as the word is understood in New England, 
has made no inroads on their complexions or eye- 
sight. They have never read Emerson, never 
dipped into Kant. Their sole " categorical impera- 



20 



JAPAN 



tive " is to charm by amiability. Their faces shine 
as with the reflected light of an insensible perspi- 
ration of amiability. Amiability transpires from 
every pore, and forms a visible nimbus around their 
whole personality to an extent of at least eighteen 
inches. 

It would be half invidious, however, to charac- 
terize this child charm of the young women of 
Japan under the aspect of arrest of development. 
The phrase implies something abnormal and stunted. 
On the contrary, they seem to have reached their 
full stage of child maturity, and never to have been 
meant to go any farther, — never to have been 
fashioned to reach self-consciousness. As one 
grows familiar with Japanese gardens, planted 
with miniature beeches, pines, and oaks, adorned 
with miniature rivers, bridges, and lakes, and set 
off with a miniature volcano and with a miniature 
gorge suggestive of Fujisan and the abysses on its 
flanks — the whole pretty scene from Lilliput seems 
lacking in flavor of natural human interest till one 
sees in his mind's eye these dainty little beings 
turned loose to play there. 

Indeed, as a preacher, one would hardly know 
how to adapt a serious sermon to their spiritual 
estate, but would feel the duties of his responsible 
calling graciously fulfilled in taking his little flock 
to picnics and watching them smile. 

Some one has written a book on the Japa- 
nese Smile. I have never read it, but here 
is my spontaneous impression. For a thousand or 



THE JAPANESE SMILE 21 



more years now the smile has been the most vital 
tenet of J apanese social religion. Unintermitting 
as has been their devotion to the cultivation of 
chrysanthemums and wistarias, still more uninter- 
mitting has been their devotion to the cultivation 
of the smile. " The road to happiness and the road 
to fortune lie in the smile," is a familiar proverb. 
Even if one is to communicate the news of the 
death of his nearest and dearest, or of the burning 
down of his house, or of the total wreck of his 
property, he is to do it with a smile. Let no one 
trouble another with a sign of grief or pain ! Most 
especially is this the law for women, the end and 
aim of whose existence is to charm her superior, 
man, — the being for whom she was created. Now, 
nothing short of a thousand years of inherited prac- 
tice could have achieved the result witnessed on 
every hand. What wry faces we make when try- 
ing, in company, to smile cheerfully over an ulcer- 
ated tooth ! but the Japanese woman can do it as 
naturally and sweetly as though the malign molar 
were a piece of French confectionery. 

For example, only a couple of days after arriv- 
ing, I went with my travelling companion into the 
country to visit a man who had, for a number of 
years, been a servant in his household in Massa- 
chusetts, but had now returned to J apan and taken 
unto himself a young wife. The two were living 
in a very humble way, raising silk-worms. 

Duly taking off our shoes, we politely entered in 
our stocking feet, and before long were presented 
to Mrs. Tokyo, as, by way of disguise, I will call 



22 



JAPAN 



her. Oh, the inimitable grace with which she 
glided down on hands and knees before us, and 
touched the ground three times with her forehead ! 
In my whole life I never felt so queer a sense of 
somehow or other being the blessed babe, subjected 
to the adoration of the shepherds. No doubt the 
mental confusion was pardonable in the case of one, 
for the first time in life, an object of female wor- 
ship. My friend and I, of course, did our best to 
return the salutation ; but we must have appeared 
sheer barbarians. Veiled in her flowing robes and 
girt with her broad, rich belt, Mrs. Tokyo's every 
movement was grace itself ; while our stiff joints 
enacted the angularity of a pair of skeletons at a 
court presentation. 

The more formal part of the ceremonial over, we 
now sat down together on the floor matting, Mrs. 
Tokyo with her feet and limbs tucked under her as 
daintily as a bird tucks her head under her wing, 
and we with ours sprawled out. Now came the 
chance to study, at close quarters, the mystery of 
the Japanese smile. At every pleasant word ad- 
dressed her through the wretched medium of her 
husband's interpretation, the smile beamed forth 
afresh, with a sort of afterglow lingering on till 
another sunrise broke in rose and gold. And yet 
all this while the poor, dear creature must have 
been suffering torture. To her we were as envoys 
extraordinary and ministers plenipotentiary from 
Teheran, infinitely her superiors in education, so- 
cial position, knowledge of the world, — in every- 
thing but grace. But all inward torment was 



THE CURIO FEVER 



23 



hidden behind the girlish glee and sweetness of the 
smile. 

"What force of will, what power of self-con- 
trol ! " the New England mind would argue. No, 
there was no will in it. The Japanese smile is a 
national institution, and not an individual act. It 
is the distilled essence of a thousand years of trans- 
mitted practice. Though at the farthest remove in 
beauty from the abstract grin which was all that 
remained of the vanishing cat in " Alice in Won- 
derland," it none the less represents just such 
an abstraction. No need is there of anything be- 
hind it. In the majority of cases there is nothing 
behind it. It now floats disengaged on the air, 
without conscious motive, pure smile per se. In- 
voluntarily, I recalled the words of Napoleon to 
the French troops in Egypt, — " Forty centuries 
look down upon your deeds ! " Only the words 
took on the slightly modified shape, " Forty centu- 
ries smile on you through the lips and eyes of Mrs. 
Tokyo ! " 

Of course, to one habituated to the streets 
of an American or a European city, with 
their massive buildings and plate-glass windows for 
the display of goods, the uniform monotony of the 
long rows of plain, low, frontless structures of wood 
imparts, in Japan, a decidedly shanty-like look to 
a city. Perforce, one thinks of an immensely mag- 
nified Leadville, or like mining towns in Colorado, 
struck with a stupendous "boom" of prosperity, 
while still in the board and shingle stage of archi- 



24 



JAPAN 



tectural evolution. Once, however, begin to in- 
spect the treasures exposed in the shops, and forth- 
with Aladdin's battered old lamp is at its magic 
work. What a wealth of bronzes, vases, exquisite 
designs in porcelain, lacquer, inlaid work, ivory 
carving ! The shop seems but a cheap wood-box 
to pack all these costly articles into. One cannot 
escape a half-humorous sense of how thoroughly 
Wordsworth would have enjoyed such an exhibi- 
tion of " plain living and high shop-keeping." 

Now sets in, with all who have money to spend, 
the mania of curio-buying, — as distinct a form of 
malarial fever as attacks those first reaching the 
Congo, or the Niger, in Africa. The blood-tem- 
perature mounts to 105°, the eyes glare wild, the 
cheeks burn with a hectic flush. Only to think of 
it ! — the century-old Feudal State of forty million 
people suddenly broken up, and such a wealth of 
Daimio and Samurai armor, pikes, swords, trin- 
kets, carvings, bronzes, precipitated in an ava- 
lanche on the market, — not to speak of the shoals 
of infinitely clever artisans ever in the background 
to supply new antiques as fast as the old ones are 
exhausted. 

Personally protected myself from any attack of 
the curio-fever by the quinine tonic of lack of 
funds, it was still vastly interesting to study the 
violent symptoms in others. However stoutly 
cynical moralists like La Rochefoucauld may deny 
it, there is, after all, such a thing as disinterested 
shopping, — shopping through pure unadulterated 
sympathy with a friend who is able to indulge in 



STRAWS 25 

lavish expenditures you yourself cannot afford. 
For the exercise of this virtue, I was most felici- 
tously blest, as in the instance of my opulent trav- 
eling companion, the fever broke out in the most 
virulent shape from the day of our arrival in Yoko- 
hama, — to the degree even of causing him, in the 
delirium of the first night, to rave about cabling 
for an additional letter of credit so immense in 
sum total, that hardly could the Bank of England 
have cashed it. In three days he had accumulated 
Samurai swords enough to equip a regiment of 
cavalry ; screens enough to fence in Boston Com- 
mon; exquisitely embroidered silk bedspreads 
enough to cover all the beds in all the wards of 
the Massachusetts General Hospital; ivory carv- 
ings enough to create a panic among the yet re- 
maining elephants in Africa. Vastly instructive 
was it to go round with him and see him purchase 
experience. It was a liberal education in shop- 
ping. 



In recording one's impressions of a new and 
strange land, it is perhaps only just to set 
down first those that seem lighter and more tri- 
vial. Light and trivial, however, they are not to 
one who looks at them with a deeper eye. Straws 
show which way the winds blow and the currents 
set. So, if only one learns these grave facts, what 
matter that it was a dancing straw that taught him. 
Moreover, in venturing on a little unobtrusive 
book, it will never do for the writer too suddenly 
to throw open the flood-gates to the mighty tide 



26 



JAPAN. 



of statesmanlike views, philosophic speculation, aes- 
thetic range and rapture, he feels himself capable 
of pouring forth. This might frighten off modest 
readers, humbly distrustful of their power to cope 
with such a mind. 



II. 



j Among the first excursions from Yokohama 
the visitor to Japan is eager to make, is 
the one to Kamakura, to see the colossal bronze 
image of the Buddha. How often had I read and 
dreamed of this, and now it was realized romance 
that it was so close at hand. One leaves by rail, 
and, after a ride of twenty miles, takes to the 
omnipresent jinrikisha for a few miles more. The 
rice-land country, through which the train runs, is 
beautiful beyond praise. 

Not personally addicted to rice as an article of 
diet, — unless, perhaps, as a mere vehicle for the 
piquant stimulus of curry, — I was soon forced to 
admit that the cultivation of this cereal for purely 
aesthetic ends would prove an enhancement of the 
charms of the Garden of Eden. At this late Sep- 
tember season of the year, the rice-lands stretch 
out in the sunshine a sea of gold. Since rice de- 
clines to grow except in water, and water declines 
to stand still except on a perfect level, the im- 
mense area of alluvial deposit in which the plant 
roots wears the look of a lake of luxuriant, sunlit 
vegetation. Encircling in graceful curves this vast 
burnished expanse — now jutting out into it in 
promontories and now retreating to leave space for 
lovely bays — are hills densely wooded, completing 



28 



JAPAN 



the picture with ravishing contrasts of form and 
color. 

Curiously enough, each charming little valley, 
with its brook winding down between the densely 
wooded hills to the shining level of the plain, now 
delights the eye with the exact transcript of a 
series of beautiful cascades of golden rice. As in 
the gardens of Versailles, streams of water are 
made to run down great flights of broad stone 
steps, breaking into a gentle fall at each suc- 
cessive step, so here the same effect is wrought 
by utilizing the water of the descending brooks 
for successive terraces of rice. So vivid the im- 
pression of life and motion, that literally it seems 
as though the beautiful plant itself had taken to 
the mobile ways of the element in which it grows. 
When one pictures the scene of an infinite 
variety of these lovely little valleys, pouring their 
brooks of gold through luxuriantly wooded defiles 
into a sea of gold below, he will have presented to 
the mind the sight that makes one of Japan's 
most characteristic beauties. 

^ Though once a capital of Japan, with 1,000,- 
000 inhabitants, all that remains of Kama- 
kura to-day is a struggling village on beautiful 
Sagami bay, the next bay southward of that of 
Yokohama. Besides a temple to Hachiman, the 
God of War, and another to Quannon, the God- 
dess of Tenderness and Love, and the great im- 
age of the Buddha, here called the Daibutsu, no 



KAMAKURA 



29 



traces remain of what, in 1400, was an immense 
city. All has lapsed back to primitive hills, valleys 
and trees. 

At first one is tempted to smile derisively at the 
statement that a million people once joyed, suffered 
and died here in a crowded capital, and to say, 
" Oriental figures must be taken with oriental sta- 
tistical imagination ! " But this were a mistake. 
Japanese cities leave no ruins. With the removal 
of Mikado, or Shogun, to another spot, — and sixty 
times has this occurred in the course of Japanese 
history, — the card-board city is abandoned to rot 
away or be burned for fire- wood, — just as with the 
North American Indians: when the chief shifts 
his camping ground, the whole wigwam village 
must follow in his train. It is the same experi- 
ence, only on a vaster scale. Perhaps, as a symbol 
of the transitoriness and evanescence of all finite 
things, of the vanity of the griefs and passions bar- 
ricadoed in the wriggling ant-hills of human life, 
no spectacle could be presented more fitted to at- 
tune the mind to the contemplation of the serene^ 
Nirvana-wrapped Buddha. As one walks medita- 
tively nearly a mile back from the sea shore, along 
an avenue shaded with century-old cryptomerias, to 
the elevation on which are seated the temples of 
Hachiman and Quannon, it is the counterpart, in 
this temple of Nature, of traversing the main aisle 
of a Gothic cathedral to approach the Holy of 
Holies of the altar. 



30 



JAPAN 



ttt All this delay is not keeping the colossal 
Buddha too long waiting. He recks not of 
time or space. He dwells in a realm in which the 
finite is swallowed up in the infinite. He has en- 
tered on Nirvana. While he is seated there, century 
after century lapses unheeded by. The magnifi- 
cent feudalism of the past is broken in pieces ; the 
noisy Occident clamors at the gates of the Orient ; 
the thunder of Commodore Perry's guns rever- 
berates in Yokohama Bay ; the fierce, discordant 
shriek of the locomotive, symbol of the insane 
restlessness and fever of the finite, tears the quiet 
air into shreds. But he broods on, forever lifted 
out of and above the whole mad "causal nexus" of 
desire, pursuit, possession, leading inevitably on to 
satiety, heart-break, greed, crime, dust and ashes. 

Overwhelmingly one feels all this, as through an 
avenue of giant trees he approaches the colossal 
image of the Buddha. It is vast enough in its pro- 
portions to seem a part of surrounding nature, 
to awaken the vague sense of sharing the purely 
elemental life. The prosaic mathematics of size 
simply belittles and vulgarizes the weight of the 
impression. In a sitting posture fifty feet high, 
forty feet broad, eyes three feet, mouth seven feet 
long, — these are statistics for the empty, gaping 
crowd. One hastens to fling the figures off his 
mind, and, instead, to revert to Keats' awe-inspir- 
ing parallel of Saturn in the gloomy grove ; so like 
and yet unlike. 

" Deep in the shady sadness of a vale 
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, 



THE BUDDHA 



31 



Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star, 
Sat gray-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone, 
Still as the silence round about his lair ; 
Forest on forest hung* about his head 
Like cloud on cloud." 

Colossal embodiment of a great world-religion 
that has brought rest to millions of the weary and 
heavy-laden, the tranquil, breathless essence of that 
rest revealed in its now super-sensuous founder, — 
such is the significance of the vast presence before 
one ! The mighty head bowed in serene tran- 
quillity, the breathless calm, the peace too massive, 
too diffused, too elemental, to suggest any finite 
form of thought, of desire, of emotion, — yes, the 
peace passing understanding , which could not be 
what it is if the understanding could grasp and 
measure it, — this, the ineffable, interior heaven 
of the supreme mystics of all ages, of Plotinus, 
Boehme, Saint Teresa of Avila, is what the great 
image makes palpable to soul and sense. 

Still, it naturally may be asked, is it not to its 
colossal magnitude that the Kamakura Buddha 
owes the main reason of the overwhelming impres- 
sion it exerts ? Of course, it is to this, if only we 
add colossal magnitude suffused through its every 
dreaming atom with indwelling soul. Magnitude 
means magnitude. The little may suggest, but 
cannot body forth, the vast and circumscribing. 

All the sublime creations of the ages are colossal 
in mass. The wrestle of Job with the Almighty, 
the Prometheus of iEschylus, the Lear of Shake- 
speare, the Satan of Milton, the Fifth Symphony 



32 



JAPAN 



of Beethoven, each and all are and must be colossal 
to produce the effect they work on the mind. Des- 
olation, defiance, revolt at injustice, heaven-storm- 
ing aspiration, each and every passion of the breast 
of man is in these vast creations raised to super- 
human proportions. On any other terms, as well 
expect miniature raised-map reductions of the Alps 
and Himalayas to do the work for the imagination 
of their rock-bastioned, cloud-girt, snow-and-ice- 
crowned originals. 

Here then, first, gets its overwhelming expres- 
sion the root-thought of Buddhism, — the soul up- 
lifted like a sunlit peak above the clouds of this 
storm-troubled sphere. Out of the cloud-realm 
pour down on all who dwell below the dank, driz- 
zling rains, or dart the lightning forks that shatter 
earthly good in ruin. Above them lies the un- 
troubled ether. And toward the supreme embodi- 
ment of this thought in the Kamakura Buddha it 
would seem as though the very elements of earth- 
bred havoc had conspired. Once the statue was 
covered in by a temple, where, penned in such a 
petty, finite enclosure, its majestic effect must have 
been wholly lost. In rolled from the ocean a great 
earthquake wave, sweeping away every vestige of 
the temple, but leaving the mighty, dreaming 
Buddha unstirred from his base. He heard it not, 
felt it not, but brooded on in impassive calm. And 
so, century on century, he sits under the open sky, 
wrapt in his infinite peace. The rains descend, 
the lightnings flash, the woods rock in the roaring 
gale, dynasties rise and fall, Lilliputian tourists 



BUDDHA 



33 



from the far West peer and peep, and air the last 
fashions of a trivial world around his mountain 
base. But he is oblivious of it all. It cannot pen- 
etrate Nirvana, where he dwells in unbroken rest. 

It is a great privilege to pass even a brief hour 
before this stupendous symbol of the faith of mil- 
lions of one's fellow creatures, and to be led by it 
into nearer communion with one of the vast world- 
interpretations of the problem of human destiny. 
Indeed, it leaves behind in the heart a yearning to 
spend, in a kind of spiritual retreat, the mornings 
of a whole month, meditating in such a presence. 
For who can fail to recognize how immense a role 
the essential principle of Buddhism has played 
in the spiritual history of reflective and sensitive 
minds in all ages and in all lands. 

Heart-sick weariness over the dust-whirl of the 
finite, — its petty cares, its mosquito stings, its 
commonplace vacuity, its fitful fever of hectic ex- 
citement, — surely one does not need to cross wide 
seas to encounter minds fretted as with sharp acids 
that have eaten in the pattern of all this dreary 
scheme of human life. Those there are, of course, 
to whom nothing is tragic, men, and women too, 
incapable alike of the rapture of joy or the agony 
of grief that are the vital substance of the heavens 
and the hells of deeper natures, — - men and women 
who could sleep heavily through Gethsemane, or, 
should they chance to awaken for a moment and 
catch a glimpse of the Son of Man in his agony, 
would, at their deepest, but utter their sympathy 
in an " Ah ! really ! I suppose it all must have 



34 



JAPAN 



been quite a disappointment ! " and then resign 
themselves to sleep again. And, as the world goes, 
they are good, average people. 

Historically, however, and with all deeper and 
higher minds, this shallow or stolid complacency 
in the presence of the suffering of human life has 
never held its own. At the root of Christian mo- 
nasticism, of the theology of the mediaeval Catholic 
church, and of the wide-spread shapes of Calvinism 
and J ansenism, lies an element always kindred to 
the Buddhistic despair of the world, — the deep- 
down sense that the world, as it is, exists but to 
be denied and ultimately delivered from ; while 
in how much of modern philosophy is the whole 
strain pitched in the same minor key ! Hegel but 
repeats the Buddha. Nor is this mere theme for 
regret. Better any religion or philosophy, however 
dark the colors in which it paints the actual, than 
shallow acquiescence in the world as it is, with no 
suffering consciousness of its evil, nor yearning for 
redemption from its appalling mystery. 

Spite of all that lies latent behind it, or 
breaks through in deeper intuitions, this 
world is, after all, a very finite, bustling, kaleido- 
scopic world. Pure, abstract being is too meta- 
physical, at any rate for tourists, and anon must 
be broken up by the prism of the five senses into 
trees, flowers, society, laughter, lunch, eager curi- 
osity, and keen-eyed perception. Emphatically did 
we feel this when we left the mighty, brooding 
presence and took once more to our jinrikishas. 



BACK TO THE FINITE 



35 



We were a party of nine, each one of whom had 
three coolies, two to run tandem in front and one 
to push behind. Thus, in single file, we stretched 
out in double-quick procession several hundred 
feet ; and, as the coolies evidently " felt their oats," 
from the bowls of rice they had eaten, we were 
soon speeding along at a rattling pace. 

What exquisite garden culture in the fields on 
either hand ! Every inch of soil how made to tell, 
and to tell in two to three crops in rotation ! The 
blooming buckwheat, the polished lanceolate leaves 
of the J apanese potato, the feathery-topped carrots, 
— never a weed there put in trace of competition 
in any struggle for the survival of the fittest for the 
pot of the Japanese peasant. And yet how tiny 
each separate little patch of beans, or rice, or what 
not! Doll vegetable gardens they looked. Yes, 
everything in miniature again ! Again, infinite 
concentration on the minutest details, — the irre- 
sistible shaping force that necessitates the form 
everything takes in Japan, agriculture, service, 
manners, ornamentation, lacquer or cloisonne, carv- 
ing, painting. On pain of death, with starvation 
as herald of the doom, no one may dare to slight 
a feature of his work. Yet all is " unresting, un- 
hasting," to a degree that, spite of his motto, 
Goethe himself could never reach over the most 
elaborate finish of a poem. 

We were bound for Enoshima, a beautiful pro- 
montory jutting out into the Pacific, its forest- 
crowned top the seat of a famous temple, and, at 
its base and climbing its slope, a fishing village, 



36 



JAPAN 



where all kinds of beautiful objects are made of the 
shells, seaweeds, sea-urchins, sponges, and corals 
gathered from the deep. Breaking journey only 
for lunch at a charming half tea-house, half hotel 
sanatorium, where, in the shelter of pine groves 
sifting out any chill from the winds, delicate Jap- 
anese and Europeans seek relief from the more ex- 
posed situation of Yokohama bay, we started out 
again under a weight of obeisances from the bevy 
of girls in attendance that made each one of us 
the equal in consciousness with the sultan of the 
Sublime Porte. Whereas, at home, we Americans 
are but ordinary " sovereigns," and no one of the 
seventy million sovereigns shows a jot of respect 
for the royal insignia of the others. Of course, 
as became good republicans, we now felt corre- 
spondingly exalted. 

y Of all the " coigns of vantage " for a phi- 
losopher, — better far than any basket sus- 
pended between heaven and earth, — commend me 
to the seat of a jinrikisha. No other such throne 
of contemplation does the world afford. One is 
utterly alone. No care for himself demands atten- 
tion. No voice of another disturbs the silence of 
his meditation. Fresh material of observation is 
opened up to him at every turn. Far from having 
to spin spider-film theories out of the bowels of his 
own consciousness, like the student in his closet, 
eye and ear are on the alert to furnish data that 
can be relied on to confirm or to rebut his shaping 
generalizations. 



THE PHILOSOPHER'S PERCH 37 



What might not Immanuel Kant have become 
under these conditions ! At first, perhaps, the jin- 
rikisha philosopher is all eye, all rapture. " Oh, 
the ravishing beauty of this land ! " he constantly 
exclaims, as he is smoothly whirled high above the 
sea along a road from which he looks down to the 
beach below fringed with creamy foam, or off over 
the dreamy surface of the water to bays and pro- 
montories and mountain-crowned islands, steeped 
in so poetic an atmosphere. Next, to turn a defile, 
the road curves inland a mile or so, where orange- 
trees hang thick with fruit, and the persimmons 
show red and gold among the foliage, and the steep 
slopes of the defiles are waving with the feathery 
plumes of the bamboo, till again, the cry, "The 
sea ! the sea! " 

But your philosopher on his perch is no fool of 
sense and time and space. He will both eat his 
cake and have it. By degrees his outer eye begins 
to close and his inner eye to waken. Then inevi- 
tably looms up again before him the Nirvana-lapsed 
Buddha of the morning, and he begins to ruminate 
on the nature of the century - long influence the 
mighty dreamer has exerted on the children of this 
mobile race about one on every hand. So, here for 
his speculations ! 

From the very superficial view I have been en- 
abled to take of the Japanese people of to-day, it 
seems to me that the Kamakura Buddha over- 
expresses the character of the influence Buddhism 
has exerted on them. The great image dates back 
to the thirteenth century, to the times in which the 



38 



JAPAN 



original Buddhistic missionary spirit had not yet 
lost its first vitality. Far more of India, and of 
its deep pessimistic despair, and of its deep-down 
yearning for deliverance through simple escape 
from all that makes up to it the weary summary of 
finite existence, is manifest in the statue than holds 
actually true of the Japanese people as one sees 
them now. They are not an Oriental race, in the 
sense of a race dwelling under the overpowering 
heat and among the jungles infested with the tigers, 
cobras, scorpions, and malarias of Hindostan. 
Quite as much are they a northern as an Oriental 
race, and latitude plays a far more significant part 
in the development of a people than longitude. 

In reality, the Japanese are more nearly allied 
in temperament to the French than to the inhab- 
itants of India. They may derive their main reli- 
gious conceptions from India, just as the French 
derive theirs from Judaea ; but they have modified 
them profoundly. After all, this term " Eastern " 
is a misleading term. It implies simply east from 
some conventional point, say Greenwich. Every 
place on the globe is east from some other place. 
But this fact is nothing in comparison with such a 
question as that of north or south, that of a tem- 
perate or of a tropical climate. Japan is breaking 
away from the East in the conventional sense, and 
is coming to the consciousness that her future 
means alliance with America and Europe, with 
their science, politics, philosophy, and ultimately 
with their more hopeful religion. 

All this signifies that the J apanese are not over- 



THE PHILOSOPHER'S PERCH 39 



poweringly a brooding, dreamy people, but an alert, 
mobile, impressionable, at once artistic and practi- 
cal people. They dwell in one of the loveliest and 
most diversified countries in the world, with coast 
lines as changeful as those of Greece and its archi- 
pelagoes, with a flora of the most marvelous variety, 
with mountains, lakes, forests, and meadow lands 
of extraordinary beauty. All this they enjoy to 
the full with a naive, childlike, unreflecting delight. 
They do not seek the forest as the Buddha did, to 
get out of the glare and heat of every-day reality, 
to be free to brood undisturbed, to have all the dis- 
tracting multiplicity of light and color and form 
quenched in twilight obscurity, that the inward 
alone may possess the mind. Rather is their de- 
light sought in the fascinating diversity of the out- 
ward and the finite. The tint of a cherry blossom, 
the delicacy of a bit of moss, the graceful curve of 
a spray of woodbine, the dart of a bird at a but- 
terfly, or the motion of a fish in a pool, — these 
they prize above all the abstractions in the world 
or beyond the world. To catch, as it were, on the 
wing the living spirit of all these, to reproduce 
them at once with fidelity and freedom in metal, 
wood, ivory, embroidery, dress-pattern, sketch in 
color, — to make the most ordinary household uten- 
sils reminders of them, and fragrant with their 
beauty and perfume, — just here lies the attitude 
of the Japanese mind toward nature. 

Be it confessed, the profounder questions of hu- 
man life and destiny have in no age taken a strong 
speculative hold on this people; while the more 



40 



JAPAN 



practical and superficial ones have been marvelously 
resolved. It is in vain that one will seek among 
them for any deep original thinkers on social, phi- 
losophical, ethical, or religious subjects. From 
China, with India behind it, they have imported 
their theology, moral and social systems, manners, 
and art in its myriad forms. These they have 
modified in accordance with their own social needs, 
exquisite taste, and placidity of temperament. 
With them, the awful Buddhistic temple of India 
becomes a miracle of fanciful and intricate lacquer 
work; while the superb groves of cryptomerias, 
pines, and camphor-trees surrounding those tem- 
ples are the happy play-grounds of thousands of 
children and of throngs of merry-making pilgrims. 

None the less, in just the same sense that Europe 
is Aryanized Christian, so is Japan still thoroughly 
Buddhistic in attitude, the present rage for Herbert 
Spencer notwithstanding. Like all Oriental peoples, 
the Japanese are penetrated with the sense of the 
evanescence of life, that it is a vapor which vanishes 
away, a bubble that bursts and is gone. Still, it 
is a beautiful bubble, iridescent with rainbow colors 
and bright with a thousand charming reflections. 
Even if not that, at least it can be borne with quiet 
patience or ignored with quiet indifference. Any- 
how, it is a small matter, not worth breaking the 
heart over, if there is such a thing as the heart. 
Beyond the bourne, the ancestors live on in some 
vague, impersonal way. Burn incense to them and 
plant flowers on their graves, to keep alive the 
dreamy sentiment. Soon will the like be done for 



THE PHILOSOPHER'S PERCH 41 



us. Meanwhile, there are careless, pretty children 
to play with, cherry blossoms, wistarias, lotus 
flowers wherewith mildly to intoxicate the senses, 
crowds of neighbors to chat and gossip with, charm- 
ing designs to work out in wood, ivory, and metal, 
" unresting, unhasting " work to keep the mind 
diverted from worry, with, crown of all, retirement 
from the cares of life at fifty, when the children will 
look out for us ! 

Such is the creed, even though, as with all creeds, 
sharp and stern inroads are made on it by the 
tougher experiences of life. But the mistake of 
mistakes is it to think that creeds effect nothing 
because they are unavailing to effect everything. 
They are an atmosphere, tonic or depressing, uncon- 
sciously breathed in at every inhalation. To " break 
up the tables with a laugh " because, forsooth, the 
Roman Stoic sometimes cut a wry face over an 
agonizing toothache is a very shallow way of dis- 
missing to limbo the value of a shape of faith that 
put iron into the blood of millions. All great 
world-ideals, Christian, Buddhist, Stoic, Epicu- 
rean, Mohammedan, are working forces of incalcu- 
lable range and power. 



III. 



j For lack of space I must pass very rapidly 
over the impressions left by an excursion of 
some days to Miyanoshita, Hakone lake, and over 
the Ten Province Pass to Atami on the seashore, 
at which last point even Sir Edwin Arnold's multi- 
tudinous command of gushing vocables gave out, 
and he was forced to lie down and pant in breath* 
less incapacity of further expression. The excursion 
was poetry from beginning to end. As nobody ever 
looks out the position of any region on the map, 
it is perhaps superfluous to add that the peninsula 
of Idzu, on which Atami lies, is south and west of 
Yokohama bay, and that the Hakone region back 
of it is mountainous. Natures there are, however, 
that must get vent topographically or die. 

To mount from Yumoto to Miyanoshita, an 
ascent of 1400 feet, our jinrikisha runners 
did the five miles of steep uphill work inside of 
fifty minutes, including a momentary stop for a sip 
of tea, generally their only stimulant. We had three 
coolies each, and all through the awful pull they 
smiled like cherubs. " Let the galled jade wince, 
our withers are un wrung," was snapped out from 
every elastic muscle. And yet we Americans insist 
that a vegetable diet is unequal to imparting 



BAMBOO GRASS 



43 



strength. These fellows, moreover, have intellect 
enough left to refresh themselves after their tough 
work by playing chess, that most strenuous of re- 
laxations for all but Napoleon Bonaparte. 

As the road wound along a picturesque 
mountain gorge, far below at the bottom of 
which was a leaping river, broken by frequent water- 
falls whose white foam shone out in relief against 
the dense foliage, gradually there opened upon, us 
the higher slopes of the mountains, as they rose 
clear from the forest, clad in a pure naked beauty 
of olive-green that was a fresh revelation in Japa- 
nese scenery. These slopes stretched as wide-rang- 
ing and unbroken as the pasture lands of the Alps, 
and yet in color offered such a contrast. " Sym- 
phonies in olive-green, with infinite variations in 
light and shade, on the same theme," painter 
Wynants would have called them. Yet as we 
feasted in delight on their poetic beauty, we could 
make out no herds of grazing cattle or flocks of 
nibbling sheep. None the less, as Wordsworth 
puts it, these seeming pastures were an " appetite," 
awakening in us vague but delicious reminiscences 
of happy grazing days in bygone stages of being. 
Why should not living sentient cows and sheep of 
to-day enjoy the feast along with us ; they chewing 
the cud of the juicy grass and w r e the cud of its 
aesthetic charm ? 

It seemed a wrong. It was a wrong. The " sym- 
phony in olive-green " was of bamboo grass, whose 
flinty silicious sheathing cuts the coats of the 



44 



JAPAN 



stomachs of the countless herds it might otherwise 
nourish. Yet Japan is three fourths mountains, 
and, in certain immense regions, the bamboo grass 
is everywhere. But for it, the hills might be as 
white with flocks and as rich in the browns and 
reds of dappled cattle as Wales or Scotland. A 
high price this to pay for simple beauty, but oh, 
how beautiful it is ! What a light, too, it cast on 
an enforced vegetable diet. Free will is not so 
absolute a thing as we are apt to take it for. 

Should I attempt to describe the Fujiya 
hotel in Miyanoshita, it would only be 
to swoon like Sir Edwin Arnold before Atami. 
Once in a while, even in this imperfect sphere, is 
the ideal reached, and the ideal is the ideal, the 
standard of perfection, alike whether in hotel, 
poem, or strain of music. Not only have the 
Japanese sent abroad their brightest young intel- 
lects to study medicine and philosophy in Germany, 
military and naval science in America and England, 
engineering in Switzerland, but wherever a culinary 
mind of the highest order has emerged above the 
average level, they have dispatched it swift to 
Paris, to master the subtlest secrets of the white- 
aproned, paper-capped artists presiding over the 
kitchens of that famed metropolis. Again a straw, 
but a straw that shows which way the wind blows. 
Let no one hope to understand the Japanese 
apart from a study of the instinctive imitativeness, 
the infinite pliability, with which they adopt all 
varieties of new ideas and lift them to perfection. 



VOLCANOES AND CLEANLINESS 45 



Beautiful, however, in all its appointments as 
was the Fujiya hotel, it was in its service that lay 
its crowning charm. This service was wholly in 
the hands of the daintiest of miniature girls, every 
flowered pattern of whose crepe dresses and every 
hue of whose silk belts seemed to have been se- 
lected by a presiding artist. Early each morning 
came a tap on the door, in would glide a little 
fairy with a tray of coffee and toast in one hand, 
and over the arm a long, loose bathing-gown. 
The tray she would deposit on a little table by the 
bedside, and then with a sunny smile lift a lump 
of sugar for the cup. Another lump ? The smile 
beamed more luminously. Still another ? It was 
diffused over the whole face. The temptation was 
almost irresistible to exhaust the whole sugar bowl, 
to see how far human ecstasy could go. Then 
would she withdraw and wait outside till, arrayed 
in the loose flowered kimono, you were ready to 
have her pilot the way for you to the bath. 

Just as the Japanese are vegetarians and 
owe it to the bamboo grass, so are they the 
cleanest people in the world, and owe it to vol- 
canoes. How would Buckle, the original inventor 
of the relations between human history and physi- 
cal environment, have leaped with joy to find him- 
self stared in the face in J apan by such confirma- 
tions of his theory. Until the advent in Europe 
and America of that last infliction of human woes, 
the plumber, — with his elaborate system of over- 
head cistern, water-back, boiler, and circulating 



46 



JAPAN 



pipes, — nobody ever thought of bathing ; while in 
Japan, on the other hand, Nature had for thou- 
sands of years been carrying on the whole elabo- 
rate process of supplying her children with boiling 
water without a word of advice, or a bill, from so 
unnecessary a functionary as the man of lead. The 
rain-clouds were the overhead cisterns, the volcano 
was the furnace, the subterranean springs were the 
boiler, the running streams were the circulating 
pipes. Not that every portion equally of Japan 
had a volcano at command to heat its water and 
fill its bathtubs. Still, they were plentiful enough 
to introduce on the widest scale the luxury, and 
to make it the custom, till now every peasant in the 
land has his tub, with natural or artifical volcano- 
attachment, in which he boils himself daily till 
fatigue or rheumatism are dissolved away. Who 
after this will say that foreign travel is not im- 
mensely improving in the vast generalizations it 
opens up before the reflective mind ? 

It is a day's journey from Miyanoshita to 
Atami over the Ten Province Pass. Too 
steep, the climb and descent, for the jinrikisha, 
one now betakes himself to the kago, a palanquin 
with long bamboo poles borne on the shoulders of 
four coolies. It is useless to attempt long descrip- 
tions of scenery. Enough that the way leads over 
the backbone of the Idzu promontory, waving 
with vast stretches of plumy bamboo grass, and 
looking down on either side to the sea breaking in 
curves of foam on the beaches. Ten Provinces 



THE TEN PROVINCE PASS 



47 



are commanded by the eye, while over them all 
Fujisan rears its superb snow-crowned cone. Wise 
is the mountain whose " soul is as a star and dwells 
apart." One Dante, one Milton, one Fujisan ! 
Atami I will not venture to picture. The fear of 
Sir Edwin Arnold is before my eyes. 



IV. 



Fifty miles or more north of Tokyo, in a 
mountain region of peaks six to eight thou- 
sand feet in height, lie the famous memorial tem- 
ples of Nikko, perhaps the most sumptuously 
adorned of any in Japan. Before undertaking to 
say a word about them, let me make a brief allu- 
sion to the past religious history of Japan. 

The day was when the Buddhist church played 
the same great role in Japan that the Roman 
Catholic played in mediaeval Europe. Just as 
Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and England were 
covered with monasteries, abbeys, and countless 
ecclesiastical foundations by the one, so was it here 
in Japan by the other. The same principles of 
human nature were at work in either case. Thou- 
sands and tens of thousands were driven by the 
turbulence and misery of ages of domestic warfare 
to seek refuge in the church. Mikados, set aside 
by more powerful rivals or voluntarily abdicating 
in sheer world-weariness, shaved their heads and 
assumed the garb of the monk. Powerful barons, 
heart-sick at last over their lives of violence and 
cruelty, hid themselves in penitence in the cloister. 
Broken traders, peasants brought to ruin, women 
blighted in their affections, refined and tender 
natures of all kinds that could not bear the stress 



AN HISTORICAL GLIMPSE 49 



of the outside world, betook themselves to this one 
haven of rest. Riches poured in. Enormous grants 
of land were made by princes and feudal lords. 
Temples were built by them in atonement for their 
sins. Theological schools were founded in count- 
less numbers ; while the Peter's pence of the poor 
amounted, in the aggregate, to enormous sums of 
steady revenue. Then followed the same results 
that were witnessed in Europe. Abbots and bish- 
ops became powerful forces in politics and in actual 
warfare. Ignorant and ferocious swarms of monks 
made themselves the terror of whole counties. 
Rival theological schools rent the land into dis- 
cordant sects in the advocacy of hair-splitting met- 
aphysical distinctions. Veritable sages and saints 
appeared. But the fatality of the Japanese mind, 
with its imitative rather than original characteris- 
tics, manifested itself through all. No new con- 
tributions of any spiritual depth were added to 
the imported creed. No monumental works of the- 
ology like the " Summa " of Saint Thomas Aquinas, 
no rich hymnology, no treasuries of devout thought 
like the " Imitation " of Thomas a Kempis, no 
noble manuals of worship to compare with the 
Roman Catholic Missal or the English Prayer- 
Book, were the return to the world for such lavish 
outpourings of the common means. 

On every hand to-day stand these truly colossal 
ecclesiastical foundations. They cover the moun- 
tain-sides with their square miles of temples, dor- 
mitories, groves, and gardens. They have their 
great ranges of state apartments for abbots, bish- 



50 



JAPAN 



ops, princes, and feudal lords. They bear witness 
to an age when they must have yielded substantial 
satisfaction to the millions who otherwise would 
not have maintained them. Not alone did they 
allay superstitious fears and furnish retreats to 
men weary of the world. They inaugurated sys- 
tems of festivals and pilgrimages which were the 
happy holiday experiences of the masses of the 
people, in whose minds were at the same time sown 
the seeds of instruction in the knowledge of good 
and evil. Moreover, the fundamental theological 
view impressed was at the last remove from the 
agnosticism of the original Indian Buddhism. 
Amida, the supreme, self-conscious Deity, had be- 
come incarnate in the Buddha to redeem mankind 
from suffering. It was not the lone, isolated 
Buddha, it was Amida Buddha, the divine-human, 
that had conquered and triumphed over the realms 
of misery, and who, in infinite compassion, showed 
the way of blessedness. Nor was this all. To the 
popular imagination, at least, were opened up 
visions of a heaven bright with hierarchies of 
angels, and of a hell terrible with the torments of 
the wicked, as many a picture in the temples re- 
veals, even though these supernatural visions never 
took such hold on the vaguely dreaming minds of 
the Japanese as on the minds of more highly vital- 
ized and passionate races. 

Many and beautiful, too, were the parables and 
legends thus spread abroad through the hearts of 
the peasantry. Let me give one of them, — the 
Japanese version of the poor widow in the Gospels, 



THE NIKKO GROVES 



51 



whose copper mite cast into the treasury out- 
weighed, in the sight of God, the gold of the rich 
man. Be it premised, for the full understanding 
of the story, that the avenues leading to the tem- 
ples in Japan are lined with high, monumental 
stone or bronze lanterns, many of them of great 
cost. The touching parable runs thus : A certain 
rich man presented a temple with a hundred fine 
lanterns, while a poor woman, who had no money 
to give, cut off her hair, and, selling it, bought a 
cheap and humble one. After they had all been 
set in place, they were one night lighted up at a 
festival. Then the god sent a powerful wind ; and, 
lo ! all the hundred lanterns of the rich man were 
blown out, while the poor widow's burned bright 
and clear through the whole night. Thus did the 
god bear witness that the liberality of the heart 
was the one thing precious in his sight. 

I have already alluded to the enormous 
spaces and superb groves surrounding great 
numbers of the temples. It would be an ample 
return for circumnavigating the globe to find one's 
self wandering for a single day under the awful 
shade and overpowering height and spread of the 
giant cryptomerias, pines, firs, and cypresses that 
cover the whole sacred mountain on which lie the 
Nikko temples. Where the great avenues are cut 
through them, with their frequent rises of stately 
flights of stone steps, the century-old trunks, lifting 
in enormous girth to a towering height, present 
a scene of monumental grandeur that Karnak in 



52 



JAPAN 



Egypt cannot surpass. It is arboreal architec- 
ture on so stupendous a scale that the aisles of 
a Cologne cathedral dwindle into insignificance 
in comparison. All the ancient Druid in one's 
blood comes out ; and his life, long centuries back, 
when the groves were the only temples, revives 
and swallows up the present and the intervening 
past. Half haunted did I feel with a strange 
fancy that here was the actual heaven to which the 
devout, nature-loving spirit of Asa Gray, our own 
peerless botanist, had been sent after its beautiful 
life on earth. How would he worship in such a 
presence ! 

Far more in these groves than in any of the tem- 
ples does the inmost spirit of the Buddhistic Nir- 
vana seem to express itself. " Come unto me, all 
ye that are weary and heavy-laden, that are lonely, 
world-weary, sin-sick, and I will give you rest ! " 
is the voiceless invitation breathed abroad. Quietly 
a strain conies stealing into the mind like that of 
Wordsworth's lines : " Thought was not : in enjoy- 
ment it expired. Wrapped in that still communion 
that transcends the imperfect offices of prayer and 
praise, his soul was a thanksgiving to the power 
that made it : it was blessedness and love." Ah ! 
could one but spend a long, full summer among 
the groves of Nikko, he would " come " to his own 
deep, inward self, healed of his wounds, life's fitful 
fever quenched, the power of the world over him 
dissolved away forever. 



THE NIKKO TEMPLES 



53 



Far less is it beauty or dignity of form than 
magnificence of ornamentation that im- 
presses one in a Japanese temple. Given a column, 
a frieze, an open-work cloister, the beam of an over- 
hanging gable, and the Japanese artist has merely 
something to start with. We are accustomed at 
home to go wild over a piece of their exquisite lac- 
quer-work. But here, in many a temple, the whole 
interior — columns, ceiling, altar, floor, images, 
shrines, candelabra — is one regal jewel-box of lac- 
quer and gold, the entire splendor above reflected, 
as in a limpid pool, in the mirror of the lacquered 
floor beneath. In many an instance the effect of 
the whole is one of such gorgeous yet harmonious 
glory that the mind is absorbed in the spectacle as a 
beautiful unity ; but this is not the abiding feeling, 
as in the grander orders of architecture, where the 
structural character is such that the whole is greater 
than the parts. In the vast majority of these tem- 
ples the case is reversed, and the parts are greater 
than the whole. Soon you find yourself kneeling 
down to admire the delicate work on a bronze, or 
marveling at the exquisite designs in red and gold 
on a lacquered shrine, or lost in delight over the 
flowers and arabesque work in panel after panel of 
the ceiling. Neither would it be fair to the genius 
of a people who express themselves in detail rather 
than in mass to do otherwise. Not so much one 
commanding mind as myriads of exquisitely delicate 
craftsmen, you feel, have wrought this beautiful re- 
sult. For years on years, in such structures as the 
mortuary temples of Ieyasu aud lemitsu in Nikko, 



54 



JAPAN 



thousands of the most artistic, aesthetic-fibred, 
patient, consummately skilled workmen the world 
ever saw were kept unintermittingly at their task. 
Thus, inevitably, the mind becomes overpowered by 
the simple historical fact, and says : " Well, if I 
cannot see the woods for the trees, then I will see 
the trees by themselves. There is a whole world 
of cunning beauty in their bark, their clinging 
vines, their lichens, their buds, leaves, and flowers ! " 

It is the work, then, of a rarely endowed people, 
instead of the work of a few exceptional men of 
genius, that one admires in these temples. The 
impression they leave on the mind is far more artis- 
tic than religious. The Japanese mind, be it re- 
peated, is the perfection of the finite. It has no 
brooding, infinite element in it, and expresses little 
of this in its architecture. Now and then an image 
of the Buddha is so beautiful in its serene peace, is 
so lost in supersensuous contemplation, that you 
feel yourself in a Catholic church in Italy, with an 
image of the redeeming Saviour before you. But 
this was a type already fixed in India ages before it 
reached Japan. No, the distinctly Japanese contri- 
bution to their temples is that of the grace, variety, 
charm, joy, of the world of birds, vines, flowers. 
Is not a peacock or a pheasant a glory of iris- 
hued color? Is not a spray of cherry blossoms a 
ravishment to the eye ? Is not a school of fishes, 
as they swirl in graceful curves through &he water, 
something to arrest and fascinate and make one 
gaze forever ? To work out these ideas, with naive 
delight, in the most exquisitely wrought, colored, 



THE NIKKO TEMPLES 



55 



and gilded wood-carving ; in the chasing of every 
brass jointure of a beam ; in the superb gilded 
candelabra of lotus leaves and flowers ; in gold- 
based screens covered with chrysanthemums, wistaria 
vines, wrens, herons — here lies the work in which 
the Japanese are as happy and at home as children 
reveling in the meadows and woods of springtime. 

If, then, I were called upon to express my own 
personal feeling as to the impression wrought by 
the actual temples of Japan in comparison with 
that of the groves, avenues, and quiet, secluded 
gardens environing them, it would be in some- 
what the following fashion that I should have to 
set to work. I enjoy immensely visiting many 
a temple ; but I enjoy it very much as I should 
visiting a transfigured and sublimated curio shop, 
exquisitely harmonized in its details. I dote on 
lacquer. I am as crazy as any woman over em- 
broideries. My finger-tips itch with kleptomania 
at the sight of choice bronzes. Screens painted 
with herons, wild geese, cherry blossoms, and wis- 
taria vines, delight me with their life and grace ; 
and as for a polished floor, — a limpid pool for the 
exquisite reflection of ceiling, gilded pillars, magni- 
ficent altar, — I could drown myself like Narcissus 
in it. Over the gilded and painted open-work, 
wood-carvings of flowers, peacocks, cranes, doves, 
monkeys, dragons, and griffins, I could delight to 
linger, in such places as Nikko, Tokyo, or Kyoto, a 
couple of hours every morning for a month, examin- 
ing them bit by bit. But the interiors are, as a 
rule, too small to produce any overpowering effect ; 



56 



JAPAN 



and no great central religious idea dominates the 
infinite variety and contrariety of the details. 
Indeed, very often I feel a half-humorous smile 
playing over my face when, after a season of real 
communion with a serenely beautiful Buddha seated 
on the lotus leaves above the altar, his eyes closed, 
his face suffused with a sense of ineffable peace 
in interior withdrawal from the world of sense, I 
suddenly become aware of all the splendid elabora- 
tion of minute and varied detail around me. Has 
the inwardly Illuminated One, after all, closed his 
eyes a-purpose, that he may shut out the bewilder- 
ing distraction of the finite multiplicity of his own 
temple, to lose himself in the oneness of the immu- 
table and unchanging ? 

In accordance with this spirit in which they 
are conceived and adorned, the temples in 
Japan are something widely different in use and 
purpose from the churches in Europe and America. 
Set, as they are, in the midst of immense spaces 
and superb groves, they furnish the parks, the play- 
grounds, the places for picnics and pilgrimages for 
the people. Temple and tea-house meet and kiss 
one another. The ceremonial worship is conducted 
by the priest, while the men and women who, as 
devotees, come up to say their prayers are, as a gen- 
eral rule, quickly through with it. They clap their 
hands to notify the god they are there, mumble a 
few unintelligible repetitions of words the original 
meaning of which is now lost, then clap their hands 
again to notify the god that they have done and he 



POPULAR USE OF THE TEMPLES 57 



may go, and themselves adjourn for rice, tea, and 
chat. Indeed, immense numbers of the prayers are 
simply written out for the worshipers on slips of 
paper, and then hung on the gratings of shrines. 
So far does this go that in many of the Shinto 
temples the awful-looking war-gods and gods of 
thunder and hurricane who guard the entrance are 
seen literally covered with innumerable spit-balls 
thrown by devotees who have first chewed up their 
paper prayers and then discharged them with force 
enough to make them stick to nose, chest, or leg. 
Thus . have the worshipers attested that they 
" mean business," and that the god shall have no 
excuse for pleading he did not know they had been 
there. The earnestness is certainly praiseworthy, 
only, one would think, a little at the cost of devout 
reverence. 

Very much of the same piece with the exter- 
nality, rather than spiritual inwardness, of all this, 
is the impression made by certain immense octago- 
nal structures, filled with all the writings of Bud- 
dhist literature and made to revolve on a kind of 
capstan fitted with handspikes, one sees in many a 
temple. The most ignorant peasant who turns this 
once round is entitled to the same "merit" as 
though he had read every one of the sacred writ- 
ings stored within. One cannot but feel what a 
labor-saving device for professors it would be if at 
least one of these could be imported and set up 
in each theological school in America. A single 
turn of the capstan, and, lo ! the stupidest fellow at 
Princeton or Andover has got all the good out of 



58 



JAPAN 



" Edwards on the Will," Hegel's " Philosophy of 
Religion," or Lotze's " Microcosmos " ! The whole 
cruel innuendo would at once be taken out of the 
old Greek saw, " There is no royal road to know- 
ledge." Still, historically, one cannot but be 
touched at the loving and pitiful spirit for the ig- 
norant and disinherited manifest in so many of 
these mechanical devices for bridging the painful 
abyss between the learned and the simple, the re- 
cluse student and the treadmill toiler. And, after 
all, how many an arid pedant, who passes muster 
for the " merits " of whole libraries devoured by 
him, has all his life only been working the capstan 
of just such a machine. 

The more one journeys about Japan, the 
more is he impressed with the unique sim- 
plicity of the type of civilization it presents. Let 
him once grasp a few of the fundamental ideas that 
underlie it, and he has the key that interprets 
nearly everything before his eyes. Of the bewil- 
dering complexity of European civilization there is 
little to perplex the mind. Leaving out the changes 
wrought in the last thirty years, the same plough 
that turned up the soil one thousand years ago 
turns it up to-day, the same junk that furrowed the 
waters a thousand years ago furrows them to-day, 
the same order of architecture that reigned a thou- 
sand years ago reigns to-day. 

Go to Venice, for example, and at a glance of 
the eye see how one grand dynasty of architec- 
ture has succeeded another, the Byzantine giving 



SIMPLICITY OF CIVILIZATION 59 



place to the Lombard, the Lombard to the Gothic, 
the Gothic to the Saracenic, the Saracenic to the 
Renaissance. Here, on the contrary, one single 
order has maintained its own for ten or twelve cen- 
turies, — originally an importation from China 
through Corea. It is the Tartar order, derived, no 
doubt, in the beginning from the old Tartar tent, 
with the immense curving and overhanging roof, 
and often series of roofs, with which every child is 
familiar from geography pictures of Chinese pago- 
das. On large buildings this roof is very effective, 
its great height, great sweep, and the facility it 
offers for the ornamentation of its ridge, eaves, and 
beams, giving it the elements of a distinct and 
noble form of construction. But what, by degrees, 
oppresses the mind is the monotony of its repeti- 
tion, making one often close his eyes to relieve the 
weary sense with changeful memories of Greek 
porticos, Roman arches and domes, Gothic aisles 
and spires. Not only is this Tartar order the one 
unfailing feature of the temples, but it is equally 
that of all the feudal castles and keeps remaining 
for inspection to-day. Mounted on the angles of 
the immense cyclopean walls that formed the forti- 
fications, the castles are all simple modifications of 
the Chinese pagoda. Evidently, in this so artistic 
people there was no spirit of initiative to conceive 
a new architectural idea ; or rather, perhaps, this 
perpetual repetition is an instructive bit of history, 
proving the inevitable result of being for ages cut 
off from contact with any but a stereotyped nation 
like the Chinese, instead of lying open, as Europe 



60 



JAPAN 



did, to the manifold influences of Egypt, Persia, 
Phoenicia, Greece, and Rome. 

I dwell at some length on this illustration from 
the architecture of Japan for the sole purpose of 
emphasizing the simplicity and lack of complexity 
characteristic of this people. The same principle 
runs through everything. The traveler's duty is 
neither to praise nor to blame, but simply to try to 
comprehend. If a nation has been cut off from 
the advantage of a liberal education in the human- 
ities at the great world-university, why, then, it has 
been cut off from such advantage ; and all is said. 
The only fair thing is to weigh and appreciate and 
be grateful for what they have done with their own 
opportunities. But this is not the spirit in which 
so much has been written about J apan. Rousseau's 
outcry of joy over his discovery of the archetypal, 
altogether adorable savage who was to regenerate 
sophisticated Europe by his artless ways, was only 
a forerunner in effusiveness of the outcry raised 
over the discovery of Japan. Japan was the ori- 
ginal Eden before the Fall, — the Fall in Architec- 
ture, Painting, Poetry, Refinement, Instinctive 
Touch with Nature. O sancta simplicitas ! 

^ I cannot quit the solemn groves of the 
Nikko, or, indeed, of any of the great Jap- 
anese temples, without a word about their bells, 
with all the deep, mysterious, mighty murmur of 
the ocean in them. Wherever one may wander 
under the giant cryptomerias and among the moss- 
grown tombs of abbots and monks, the low, rich, 



JAPANESE BELLS 



61 



powerful undulations of these bells come rolling 
in on the ear like the sound of harmonizing billows 
on the shore. Enormous in size and weight, hung 
in low pagodas but a few feet above the ground, 
and struck only by* ponderous beams of wood 
swung outside, they are always free of access to 
any passer-by. 

To stand beneath, and in part within, the dome 
of one of these great bells is an experience for a 
lifetime. The lightest stroke of a knuckle, and 
like a vast beehive the ponderous mass is in in- 
stant billion-fold molecular vibration. How it 
hums and hums and hums ! How massive, how 
deep, how sweet, how prolonged, the tone ! The 
ear lingers and lingers on it, and it will not die 
away. One feels at the soul centre of a vibratory 
world, from which stream out undulations that set 
pulsing and throbbing the whole surrounding grove, 
and whose tremulous wave motions float on and out 
through a responsive universe. Matter, in every 
material sense, is dissolved away. With the mind's 
eye one sees, clearly as did Sir Isaac Newton, that 
all the atoms of matter that go to make up the 
solar system might be " shut up in a snuff-box," 
— so free, so elastic, and such planetary spaces 
apart do they swing. 

Ah, the symbol of our human life heard pulsing 
here in this great bell ! The natures we have re- 
vered and loved, because capable of rich, deep, pro- 
longed reverberation, how in the spirit are they 
drawn about us now ! — the souls in whom, grati- 
tude once kindled, sympathy touched, devoutness 



62 



JAPAN 



moved, these divine emotions vibrate on through 
life. In contrast with this, beings there are whose 
whole response to the impact of love or sorrow 
seems but as the petty click of a spoon on the rim 
of a teacup. Lingering resonance is there none. 
The momentary click, and all is by ; while these 
deep ones, like the great bells, at each touch of 
renewing memory hum and reverberate in every 
spiritual molecule. Devout idolater does one be- 
come, as he breathes the prayer, " Oh ! for the 
capacity of long, rich reverberation like thine ! 
Without it, how shallow, how fleeting all human 
experience." So at least is it murmured in the 
ear by the deep-hearted bells of Japan. 



y. 



j A single Boston truckman has a vocabulary 
of vituperation that would more than suf- 
fice for the whole city of Tokyo, with its million 
and a half of inhabitants. As for jinrikisha men 
here, if they chance to collide abradingly to scalp 
or skin, they graciously smile on one another as 
though it were but one more of the amenities of 
the profession. The most ordinary meetings and 
partings on the street are accompanied by profound 
obeisances enough for a court presentation. Ex- 
ternally, then, there are few visible signs of fric- 
tion. Of the swarms of children, no one evinces 
the slightest addiction to pulling the hair of another, 
at any rate in public, and where there is any sanc- 
tuary of retirement for doing it in private is more 
than eye can make out. Amiably the smallest tot 
of a six-year old girl carries her twenty-pound little 
brother tied to her back, as though he were born 
there, so careful of her burden, as she plays ball 
with her mates, that rarely a collision of shaven 
heads occurs. To crown all, it has roundly been 
asserted that even Japanese babies are never guilty 
of the impropriety of crying. But this is untrue. 
They do cry, and that lustily. But then, they are 
so very young! Perfect manners at six months 
would be an unreasonable expectation even in 
Japan. 



64 



JAPAN 



What is the meaning of all this ? one begins to 
ask. Are these people so much kindlier, more 
considerate, more sympathetic, than we are ? For 
the first week in Japan the new-comer is actually 
under strong enough illusion to be capable of be- 
lieving this ; so fascinating, so charmingly acted, 
is the comedy of manners played before his eyes. 
He recalls our own brusque ways at home, and 
thinks, " Oh ! that we might ever hope to be as 
innately courteous as these people." The fact is, 
he has simply knocked the brains out of his judg- 
ment on the near bottom through an attempt to 
dive to profound depths in a pool not over two 
inches deep. It is the mistake one is forever mak- 
ing in Japan through taking outside for inside, 
expression for impression. 

Americans are too direct, even blunt, in their 
ways, to know much about the philosophy of acting, 
especially where the acting is so perfect as to have 
become a kind of substituted second nature, en- 
tirely able to dispense with any original first nature. 
" If you want to make me weep, you must first weep 
yourself," said Horace. "Not a bit of it," replies 
Delsarte, the great authority with modern French 
actors ; " on the contrary, if you want to make me 
weep, be sure to keep your own eyes dry. Your 
weeping would spoil all, Train your artistic per- 
ceptions, and then attend strictly to the outside pre- 
sentation. If you can work to such imitative per- 
fection facial muscles, gasping respiration, convul- 
sive action of voice, as to look as though you were 
suffering, then will you have me, my tender wife, 



JAPANESE MANNERS 



65 



and my ingenuous children, dissolved in floods of 
tears, even though all the while you are impassive 
as an oyster, or as cool as a cucumber. Once abso- 
lutely master the external signs, and they need no 
more vital connection with the state of mind within 
than the false face with which a child convulses 
with laughter or frightens into hysterics his little 
mates." 

For a thousand years Japan has been under tu- 
telage to an omnipresent Delsarte, working from 
outside to inside, — or little matter about inside. 
From Mikado at the top to coolie at the bottom of 
the social scale, one undeviating standard of man- 
ners has been held before the eyes of the most 
instinctively imitative people on the face of the 
earth. Originally an importation from China, this 
standard has been elaborated through centuries of 
study into ceremonial etiquette which, through con- 
stant repetition, has ended by becoming automatic. 
No one ever saw anything else, no one ever dreamed 
of anything else. There was one way of saluting 
a superior, one of saluting an equal, one of salut- 
ing an inferior ; and anybody's head would have 
been cut off who should have ventured to depart 
from it. 

From his earliest impressionable years, then, the 
Japanese child saw nothing but prostrate artisans 
saluting Samurai, Samurai saluting Daimios, Dai- 
mios saluting Shoguns, till the whole ceremonial be- 
came organized into him as thoroughly as are their 
now instinctive habits into our setters and pointers, 
— perhaps the best-mannered of our own population. 



66 



JAPAN. 



Little girls of ten will one see in good families, 
whose finish of breeding would have awakened the 
envy of a duchess at the court of Louis XIV. 
Female servants will one be lost in marvel over, at 
a dinner in the house of a Japanese gentleman, 
whose grace and quiet dignity are the quintessence 
of lady-like refinement. " Trifles make perfection, 
but perfection is no trifle," is the motto. 

Now if it meant all it says, the angels in heaven 
could not live up internally to what this code of 
manners expresses externally. Happily, no one 
is expected to live up to it internally. It is a 
purely artistic production, made to gratify the in- 
stincts of an artistic people, ceremonially evolved 
to smooth life of its asperities, to render the com- 
edy agreeable, and to flatter by the perpetual in- 
terchange of surface courtesies. The knave goes 
through its motions quite as creditably as the 
saint ; the liar, thief, or ruffian quite as effectively 
as the gentle or sincere. Nor is it to be denied 
that it renders things vastly attractive on the out- 
side, and even exercises a strong inhibiting power 
over outbreaks of petulance and rude passion. 
But the moment the mind goes deeper, it is felt at 
what a frightful cost all this is purchased. It 
falsifies the nation to the very core. It kills the 
sense of the relation that should subsist between 
genuine impression and corresponding expression, 
and perpetually suggests the idea, " All that is requi- 
site is as good a heart as can be made of a head." 
Thus, after a while, every man of frank, unconven- 
tional nature begins to hate this manner for its 



JAPANESE MANNERS. 



67 



false, its shallow, its monotonous excess, and in 
his wrath to say, " Till the Japanese have worse 
manners, they will never learn genuine courtesj^ ! 
Till they get rid of their masks, they will never 
understand the social charm of the free play of 
joy, love, sorrow ! " 

For all its ceremonial elaboration, the gamut of 
expression in J apanese manners is a very restricted 
one, comparing in range and variety with the 
best European about as a child's one-octave toy 
piano, with tinkling glass keys, as over against the 
compass of a Steinway Grand, with its sounding- 
board and resonant bass and treble. It makes 
more show at first, while in reality the range of 
shifting light and shade that lights up with gen- 
uine love, humor, intelligence, sympathy, reverence, 
a fine face with us is in comparison as an orchestra 
to a tinkling guitar. 

This must be so. There is nothing behind the 
Japanese face — politically, morally, intellectually, 
reverentially — that can hold a moment's com- 
parison with that which is behind the faces of 
those who are free-born heirs of our complex, 
magnificent historical past. Strange ignorance 
of this is it which has led so many travelers to at- 
tribute to the J apanese a depth of quality that in 
the nature of things, the order of evolution, can 
in no way belong to them ; and until one sees into 
the simplicity and even monotony — albeit a " mo- 
notony of endless variety " — that is character- 
istic alike of their literature, their poetry, their 
architecture, their music, their politics, and even of 



68 



JAPAN. 



their art, lie will never read them with discrimina- 
tion. They evolved a wonderful miniature civili- 
zation, but a miniature one it ever remained till 
they were brought into contact with races of a 
higher strain and a grander inheritance, — with 
what ultimate result, it remains yet to be seen. 

j Would one form a vivid conception of the 
ideals with which the aspiring youth of 
any country fires its heart, there is no better way 
than to visit the tombs of those canonized as the 
foremost heroes, sages, or saints of the land. Is 
one in Italy ? Then to the tombs of Dante, St. 
Francis, Mazzini, let him go. In England ? 
Then to those of Shakespeare, Cromwell, Nelson. 
In America? Then to those of Washington and 
Lincoln. For like insight, whither shall one be- 
take himself in Japan ? Without question to the 
graves of the Forty-Seven Ronins, who so loyally 
and ferociously avenged their Feudal Master. 
There will he find young men burning incense on 
a scale as nowhere else. And why ? Because the 
heroic moral standards of Japan are as much 
bound up with purely feudal ideals as were once 
those of the Scotch Highlanders, and because of 
the popular response to the idea that the supreme 
end of fidelity to the chief sanctifies any means 
in the way of the most savage cruelty, of wholesale 
suicide, of the sacrifice even of wifely chastity. 
Read, in Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, the story 
of the " Forty-Seven Ronins," as inspiring and 
as revolting a commingling as the annals of any 



HEROIC MORAL STANDARDS. 69 



people can show of magnificent self-abnegation, 
with tiger cruelty ; of the stoical endurance of 
year-long hunger and outlawry, with capacity to 
keep at a white heat the fixed fanatical idea of 
avenging a wrong done a master ; yes, and of 
absolute consecration of wifely love to a husband's 
honor, along with glorying in the degradation of 
her womanly purity as a means to subserve his 
ends. The man who can read this story without 
high-wrought admiration for such qualities of 
loyalty, courage, and fathomless contempt of self, 
has no sense in him of the heroic ; as equally the 
man belongs back in the realm of savagery who 
does not shudder at such Moloch sacrifice, on a 
blood-reeking feudal altar, of all other graces and 
sanctities of life. 

Here again we have J apan through and through, 
the paucity of her ideas, the limitation of her range 
of emotional response, her incapacity, so far, for 
the complex and synthetic, as clearly revealed in the 
narrowness of her heroic moral standard as in 
the lack of harmonic depth in her tinkling music. 
The wife of the Scotch Highlander outlawed in 
the service of his chief would unshrinkingly have 
faced with her husband starvation on the wintry 
hills ; but once had it come to the issued of degrad- 
ing her person, to supply him with means to carry 
out his fell purpose, heroically would she have cried, 
" Nay ! I will stab myself to the heart for you, 
but pollute myself, even for you, never ! " Other 
test is there none of the scope and elevation of a 
nation's moral standards than the range and char- 



70 



JAPAN 



acter of the acts that — alike by its wives, its citi- 
zens, its soldiers, its tradesmen, its statesmen, even 
to save home or country — would be spurned in 
abhorrence. 

It was a lovely October afternoon on which 
my friend and I visited the graves of the Forty- 
Seven Ronins, the focal heart of the Japan of the 
near past, as also of its burning present. Over- 
head arched the great trees, and quietly near by 
brimmed the clear pool in which, as triumphant 
avengers, they washed the bloody head of their 
master's insulter before depositing it on the mas- 
ter's tomb, and then themselves inaugurating a 
holocaust of harakiri. " After life's fitful fever, 
they sleep well," while all about stand the great 
stone lanterns, heaped in their interiors with the 
ashes of incense-sticks burned as tributes of rev- 
erence. Yet in those ashes, I felt, still glowed 
a devouring fire, with which Japan will have to 
account. These worshipers, — they are the sons 
and grandsons of the old Samurai, the former 
feudal retainers. They are the educated classes 
of to-day, the leaders in faction politics, the civil 
and military officers, outwardly changed through 
a thin veneer of Occidental culture, inwardly the 
same at heart. Rely on them for splendid cour- 
age and self-sacrifice, and you will get it. Rely 
on them for savage partisanship carried over into 
the new relations, for a spirit that will stick at 
nothing, — not at the last extreme of calumny, 
deceit, brutal violence, assassination, in behalf of 
their party chiefs, — and equally will you get it ; 



HEROIC MORAL STANDARDS 71 

nay, are already getting it. Not in vain do they 
burn incense at the graves of the Forty-Seven 
Ronins. The Forty-Seven Ronins are their na- 
tional moral ideal, as much as Garibaldi is the 
Italian's ; Nelson, the Englishman's ; Lincoln, the 
American's. Not that there are not noble excep- 
tions, and many of them. I speak of the rank and 
file. 



VI. 



No form of art has ever become popular, 
that is, a source of genuine pleasure to large 
numbers, unless through ideally interpreting to 
them ideas and sentiments deep-rooted in their own 
experience. Back of the epoch of the great Greek 
sculpture were the happy Olympian games, through 
which thousands were educated to appreciation of 
all the fine points of a developed human body, and 
to keen delight in them. Thence the cordial wel- 
come, hailing a beautiful statue. Back of the 
epoch in Italy of the painting of Perugino and 
Raphael lay the life and preaching of St. Francis 
of Assisi, dowering all the hillsides of Umbria with 
human countenances lit with the same mystic love 
and rapture which these great masters later trans- 
ferred to the canvas. Thence the devout greeting 
of their works. Even where the artist himself did 
not feel it, the people felt it. 

Equally, would the mind surrender itself to the 
peculiar charm of the painting of Japan, must one 
first seek to get into living touch with what lies 
behind it in the common heart, that is, into living 
touch with a popular naive enjoyment of nature, as 
instinctive as the delight of the bird in singing, of 
the butterfly in palpitating in the sunshine. With 
us at home there is so much affectation about 



SOURCE OF JAPANESE ART 73 



nature on the part of many who hardly, without 
yawning, can linger for ten minutes over the 
loveliest view, as to make it at times a positive 
relief to come across a man or woman bluntly 
audacious enough to say, " I hate nature ! " It is 
not so in Japan. Literally are the Saints' Festival 
Days the days of the flowering of St. Cherry Blos- 
som, St. Wistaria, St. Lotus, St. Chrysanthemum, 
the holidays in the Church Year of Nature, when 
thousands of devotees flock out to worship at these 
incense-breathing shrines. 

On St. Maple Day, when the gold and crimson 
aureoles of all the saints of this communion are 
transfiguring with the reflexes of their sheen hill 
and mountain side, what a spectacle to wander out 
into the country ! Thousands on thousands of 
people, men, women, and children, are abroad. 
Forth and back they trudge, perhaps twenty miles, 
and all to see the tints and dyes of the maples, and 
to bring home red and gold branches of them. In 
America, we would think there must be something 
going on as well worth attention as a fire or a 
strike. No, it is nothing but the maples, and they 
furnish aesthetic stimulus enough. How all day 
long do the people enjoy themselves ! Is it any 
wonder, then, they love an art that renders back 
to them these happy sensations, and that revives 
in their breasts such charming memories ! Of 
this art, they ask for no hidden symbolism, no 
inner mystic interpretation, — ask merely that it 
shall renew for them their own delight in its orig- 
inal. In their own minds, while in the presence of 



74 



JAPAN 



nature, all is undefined, floating, sensuous charm. 
Let the artist feel this, and give it delicate expres- 
sion. 

A few themes, with endless variations per- 
formed on them, — here lies the essential 
characteristic of Japanese art. But how charming 
these variations are ! Many the novelty-hunting 
English and American tourist who is heard ex- 
claiming that he is sick to death of cranes, and 
would like to take a gun and blaze away at a thou- 
sand or more superfluous screens decorated with 
them. This a Japanese could never understand. 
To him the crane is the same yesterday, to-day, and 
forever. He enjoys him wading, patting the mud 
with his feet, preening his feathers, alighting, ris- 
ing from the shore, capturing a frog, whirling in 
mid-air, and has continued thus to enjoy him for 
no end of centuries. He wants him on his teapot, 
his cup, his screen, his match-box, his wall picture, 
his wife's dress, his bronze charcoal-burner, his 
lacquered box or cloisonne vase. Too much crane 
he cannot have. And exactly the same is his feel- 
ing about lotus flowers, cherry blossoms, chrysan- 
themums. 

Such for ages was the one art demand of the 
Buddhist prelates, the Daimios, Shoguns, and Mi- 
kados ; while the artisan artists, their absolute de- 
pendent subjects, lived on the merest pittance, and 
devoted whole lives of patience, skill, and naive de- 
light in natural objects to gratifying the taste of 
the only classes who commanded wealth. With no 



VARIETY IN UNITY 



75 



hope to rise out of their narrow lot, no stimulus to 
worldly ambition or covetousness, no distractions 
to turn them aside to other interests and pleasures, 
they found their sole enjoyment in art for art's 
sake, and a little rice or millet to keep alive on. 
Time was a matter of no importance ; for to them 
there was no meaning in our American phrase, 
" Time is money." No ; time is the leisure spirit, 
to absorb and brood over impressions, to work 
them out quietly to perfect expression, to achieve at 
last something that would please the Daimio. Of 
high-wrought passion there is in Japanese art no 
trace : of childlike delight in living close to nature 
through art, no end. Dante declared that his 
verses made him lean. No Japanese could ever 
say this, or even comprehend its meaning. A sub- 
lime poet like Dante, agonizing over such a theme 
as Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, might well cry out 
that it was drinking up his blood and making his 
flesh to waste away ; but the artist, the beginning 
and end of whose work is to invite one to mere 
delight with him over the motion of a fish in the 
water, needs to be but a genial, impressionable 
child of nature, face to face with brook, tree, and 
sunshine. 

To take in all this, let one visit, for example, the 
famous Nijo Palace in Kyoto, the palace of the last 
of the Shoguns of the Tokugawa dynasty. What 
an historical commentary, the building itself, on the 
simplicity, the infinite variations on a few themes, 
of all things J apanese ! One story high, and differ- 
ing no whit in architectural structure from the 



76 



JAPAN 



plainest artisan's house on the street except in the 
immensity of its ranges of apartments, to its rich 
and splendid decoration it owes all its distinction. 
The same style of framework, only constructed of 
rarer woods ; the same sliding divisions between 
the rooms, only painted by the greatest artists ; 
the same open-work in the ramma, or ventilation 
screens, only here translated into the most fasci- 
nating carvings of birds and flowers ! Very mag- 
nificent is the effect ; for the paintings on all four 
sides of the rooms, from floor to ceiling, are on a 
ground of gold, and the splendor of the lacquer- 
work on the beams, together with the marvelous 
beauty of their gilded jointures of chased metal, 
awakens the sense of a universally diffused glory 
of sunshine. And yet in everything is revealed the 
Japanese simplicity of sensation. One thing at a 
time, and without excitement or hurry. 

Wander in imagination, on the other hand, 
through the apartments of a European palace, and 
recall how in each room attention is distracted by 
an endless multiplicity of objects. The paintings 
are here a landscape, here a cattle piece, here a 
group of figures, here a portrait ; and the mind is 
exercised with the distressing psychological prob- 
lem of seeing how many things it can take in at the 
same moment without missing any or enjoying any. 
How different in the apartments of the Shogun's 
palace ! Enter one of them, and you find its 
pictured walls entirely given up to a single subject, 
say, to marvelous delineations of wild geese, — 
wild geese swooping down in a flock on a pond, wild 



VARIETY IN UNITY 



77 



geese startled with fright and beating the water 
with their wings in their frantic attempt to rise, 
wild geese floating gracefully on the limpid mirror 
of the surface, in the double beauty of reflection. 
EVidently, the subject of interest is wild geese them- 
selves, and not a competition of attraction between 
them and Cupids, elephants, the battle of Water- 
loo, and Hamlet improving the occasion of Yorick's 
skull for moral reflection. Now, the result of all 
this is a calm, contemplative, wild-goose frame of 
mind. You become absolutely fascinated over this 
one realm of nature ; and, if you have a side 
thought, it is only to wonder why Titian and 
Raphael should ever have wasted their powers on 
madonnas, saints, and Venuses, when they might 
have consecrated them to wild geese. 

Again, you enter another room. The artist who 
here has the whole field to himself is evidently 
a devout, mystical worshrper of bamboo. " There 
is but one glory of the vegetable creation, — 
bamboo ; and I am its prophet," is the substance of 
his creed ; and in ten minutes he has converted you 
to the only sound and orthodox faith. Why care 
any more for riches, honors, luxuries, so long as 
bamboo exists, " so exquisite in its grace," as the 
French artist said, " that we can even forgive it for 
being useful"? To live, move, and have your 
being in the mind of such an interpreter of bamboo, 
— this seems the one unspeakable privilege of life, 
immediate revelation to you that the sole end of art 
is to create a soul into you which henceforth shall be 
one with the lilt of stem and dip and rise of ostrich- 
plume foliage of such a plant as this. 



78 



JAPAN 



Here are but a couple of illustrations of hundreds 
that might be given from this same Nijo Palace. 
And yet, delightedly as I felt their beauty, had I 
had along with me a bright, enthusiastic little girl 
of seven, she would have felt it just as keenly. 
While, in a Dresden or Florence gallery, she would 
soon have yawned with weariness over so much be- 
yond her reach of thought and feeling, here she 
would have taken in everything as naturally as 
though herself in the woods or on the shore of a 
lake. Thus becomes clear the reason for the univer- 
sal popularity of Japanese art, — the reason why, 
sweeping all before it, it has informed and illumined 
with its spirit every branch even of the humblest 
manufacture. 

Out of all this simplicity and lack of com- 
plexity on which I dwell, there grew one 
admirable result. Poor and rich, ignorant and cul- 
tivated, could alike appreciate the kind of art the 
land brought forth. With people in Europe and 
America, it would be the sheerest absurdity to 
say that anything like this is possible. The story 
runs that Dante once burst into a blacksmith's shop 
and pounded the blacksmith for presuming to sing 
one of his own recondite sonnets. Wordsworth, 
Tennyson, and Browning have their select circle of 
readers, Raphael and Angelo their esoteric wor- 
shipers, the Greek statues their limited groups 
of sincere appreciators. But outside of such select 
circles the works of these mighty spirits are severely 
let alone. No farmer craves the Transfiguration 



INFLUENCE OF JAPANESE ART 79 



on the side of his teapot, the Laocoon on his cart- 
harness, or the Prophets and Sibyls of the Sistine 
Chapel on his wall paper. In Japan, however, the 
exact reverse holds true. The deepest and most 
beautiful thing any Japanese artist has produced 
lies level in its essential spirit with the genuine ap- 
preciation of every man, woman, or child who has 
any fineness of sense-perception, any first-hand joy 
in nature. Here, I repeat it, is an art that has made 
itself a universal national possession. The young 
girl wants its graceful forms and harmonious colors 
on her skirt and belt ; the housewife wants them on 
her cups, saucers, and tea-caddy. The boy wants 
them on his kite ; the brazier wants them for his 
pots, the joiner for his open-work carvings. In 
fine, everbody wants them for everything ; and 
everybody gets them. Go into the cheapest bazaar 
of three to five cent articles, and they are all stamped 
with the same sign manual of beauty. The very 
cakes and confectionery are such exquisite render- 
ings of scarlet maple leaves, or chrysanthemums, 
that you would vow they had just been picked up 
in the autumn woods or cut fresh from the plant. 

^ Japan, in its whole extent and with all its 
countless little islands included, is about as 
large as North and South Dakota combined. Only 
one twelfth of its soil is arable, and even that, in 
large part, solely through the immense artificial 
system of irrigation, on which depends its rice crop. 
And yet its population is over forty millions. 
Divide the possible product of the soil of one twelfth 



80 



JAPAN 



of North and South Dakota among forty millions 
of people, and it is plain what a mouthful it would 
give to each. And yet the country was for centu- 
ries hermetically sealed against imports from foreign 
countries. Patient, untiring industry in cultivation 
was then the only safeguard against starvation. 
So poorly fed a race could not work at a high speed. 
It was unfitted for spurts. It must economize its 
forces, and expend them at low pressure only. 
Given centuries on centuries of this, and one order 
of nervous fibre is determined, as much as, given 
fifty years of working high-speed reapers, threshers, 
winnowers, and elevators, another sort of fibre has 
been developed among us. 

With the artisan-artist class the same simplicity 
of environment prevailed. They, too, were poorly 
and monotonously fed. The demand made on them 
for the products of their skill had little variety in 
it. From father to son descended the same crafts 
and technique, the same simple pleasure in exercis- 
ing them. The patrons, moreover, for whom they 
worked were the cultured classes of a race exqui- 
sitely endowed with aesthetic judgment. For cen- 
tury on century every rich temple eagerly added to 
its wealth of essentially similar bronzes, lacquer- 
work, vestments of brocade, embroideries, screens, 
carvings, images, and had its great fire-proof store- 
houses in which the larger part of its treasures 
was laid away. With the feudal lords the like 
passion prevailed. Every castle boasted its im- 
mense ancestral collection of rare and beautiful 
objects, from which could be drawn at any time 



CONDITIONS AFFECTING ART 81 



for inspection vases, porcelains, superb dresses, 
arms decorated with every delicate fancy of carv- 
ing or inlaid work. As there were no innovations 
of new ideas, invention was stimulated simply in 
the direction of imparting fresh grace and charm 
to the old. 



VII. 



j As a general rule, it will be found that the 
more dissolute and shameless the life an 
American, Englishman, or German is leading in 
Japan, the more conscientiously is he opposed to 
missions, and the lower in the scale does he rate 
the motives and character of missionaries. Really 
pathetic, for example, is it to hear him enlarge on 
the cruelty of introducing the standards of our 
severe and ascetic American sisters among these 
unconscious children of nature, their eyes not yet 
open to the fatal knowledge of good and evil. 

Along with these stanch champions of the prim- 
itive Eden before the Fall into the lost innocency 
of moral distinctions, one encounters another class 
equalty severe on missionaries. It consists of hyper- 
sensitive, aesthetic natures, so ethereally organized 
as to live in perpetual danger of " dying of a rose 
in aromatic pain." They tremble lest under the 
hot sirocco breath of the missionary, the aroma 
will be dispelled from the flower, the dew exhaled 
from the grass. 

As, after the most exhaustive investigation, I 
could never discover that any representative of 
either of these classes had ever been near a mission, 
I was forced to the conclusion that their judgments 
were either too dissolutely or too aesthetically a 
priori to be entitled to great weight. 



THE QUESTION OF MISSIONS 83 



There is, of course, a sense in which it is per- 
fectly legitimate for the modern man to hate mis- 
sions. The old idea of a mission was that of a war 
of extermination on the part of the votaries of a 
foreign religion, refusing to recognize anything 
divine or eternally human in the creeds it had come 
to supplant. The new idea — the one that is just 
beginning to dawn on the world — is that of a 
courteous, loving compassion between two peoples 
of the faiths and practices that seem to each most 
sacred. It is founded on sympathy, founded on 
the recognition of the great historico-divine influ- 
ences which, through race, situation, institutions, 
have shaped each nation. It is a simple libel to 
say that this idea is not largely recognized by 
the missionaries of to-day to Japan. They were 
the first to introduce well-ordered schools, broader 
female education, instruction in medicine, hospitals 
presided over by men of real science, with a hun- 
dred other good things. I say this all the more 
willingly because, from my tenderest years, I was 
brought up with a rabid hydrophobia against mis- 
sionaries that w r ould have staggered the resources 
of Pasteur. Is there not, then, such a thing as 
taking a broad, historical view of missions, — as 
well of their past as their future ? 

Like every other nation, Japan in the past was 
indebted to missions for its highest religious and 
material development. East Indian Buddhism, 
Chinese Confucianism, these were the great theo- 
logical and ethical influences that shaped its faiths 
and codes of conduct. Emphatically as the land- 



84 



JAPAN 



ing of Gregory IV.'s missionaries in England meant 
to the then barbaric island contact with Roman 
civilization and law, contact with Christianity's 
splendid inheritance through Judaea, Persia, Greece, 
so, in the far-away past of Japan, the landing of 
Buddhist monks and Confucian teachers meant 
contact with the profounder religious conceptions 
and higher ethical codes of great races, with thou- 
sands of years of thought and experience behind 
them. So has it always been, and so must it con- 
tinue to be. The race or nation which idly and 
vainly boasts that it is sole creator of the best it 
has is only a magnified and monstrous image of the 
individual man, who, arrogantly calling himself 
self-made, falls down on his knees and worships his 
silly little creative self. 

Japan has already given an enthusiastic welcome 
to one class of missionaries — not very disinter- 
ested ones, it is true — from the West ; that is, to 
ship-building, railroad-contracting, factory-estab- 
lishing missionaries. She has ardently received 
the science, the mechanic arts, the materialistic 
philosophy of the West; and no wonder it has 
seemed to her an "Arabian Nights" revelation. 
But, to confine ourselves simply to the English- 
speaking nationalities, is this all America and 
England have to offer, — America and England, 
who have in their spiritual blood Isaiah, Jesus and 
Paul, Plato and Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Epic- 
tetus and Seneca, Newton and Leibnitz, Shake- 
speare, Phidias, Raphael and Angelo, Kant and 
Hegel, heroes, divines, sages, and saints innumer- 



THE QUESTION OF MISSIONS 85 



able ? No man who feels anything of devout grat- 
itude for what all these magnificent influences have 
been to him can have a moment's hesitation in say- 
ing, it would prove an unspeakable boon to any 
people, never yet in living contact with so grand a 
hierarchy of powers, to be brought into vital rela- 
tions with them. 

Japan, alas ! has cause enough to say, on the 
score of the brutal international treatment she has 
received from England — though in a far less de- 
gree from America, — "If all your splendid inher- 
itance from the past has made you capable of no 
nobler spirit than you have showed to us, we want 
none of it ! " In one sense there is no answer to 
make to such an arraignment. But, in another 
sense, there is. Nationalities are as yet but big, 
bullying brutes in their dealings with weaker pow- 
ers. The higher influences pleaded for have so 
far lifted individuals rather than corporate masses. 
But individuals they have lifted by millions. Why, 
then, should not the most advanced minds among 
the nations exchange their highest ideals, pro- 
foundest thoughts, deepest sentiments, aspirations, 
and hopes, and so work on sympathetically for a 
better future ? 

No historical student who should attempt to 
compare Japan's inheritance from the past with 
that of Europe and America could for a moment 
hesitate as to the enormously richer, higher, and 
more complex character of the latter. Now, at 
last, this new-found race of the East aspires to take 
a place among the active, powerful, progressive 



86 



JAPAN 



nations of the world. The day was in the far past 
when Germany and England were stirred with the 
like impulse ; and their end was effected only by 
becoming heirs of the culture, order, and religion 
of the christianized Roman Empire, with Greece, 
Asia Minor, and Egypt behind them. Why must 
not Japan go through some similar leavening pro- 
cess, if she is to take coequal intellectual and spir- 
itual rank? A grand historical ancestry in the 
spirit she must have ; and, just as into this an- 
cestry nation after nation in Europe was adopted, 
till it became f reeborn child by assimilating all that 
was best in its culture, so must it be with this new 
aspirant among the nations. The world's highest 
achievement is no monopoly, but the common 
property of the world. Did Greece possess it once ? 
did Judaea possess it once? did Rome possess it 
once? It was but held in trust for Germany, 
France, England, against the day when their ma- 
jority should have come. Equally is it held in 
trust for Japan. 

j Entirely apart, however, from every ques- 
tion of proselytism, or of the extent of the 
conversions to Christianity made by Protestants or 
Catholics, — and they are increasingly large, — 
no thoughtful observer can fail to recognize the 
strength of the reaction that has set in within the 
bosom of the Buddhist church itself. It is a false 
idea that Buddhism is dying out in Japan, that is, 
among the masses of the people. On the contrary, 
under the stress of Christian competition, it has been 
incited to a strong and salutary revival, born of the 



THE QUESTION OF MISSIONS 87 



stimulus of contact with a more vivid religious faith 
and with broader humanitarian ideas. As to the 
government attempt to regalvanize Shintoism, and 
to enact it into a national cult, it proved an abortive 
failure. There was nothing vital in Shintoism to 
regalvanize, unless a low form of hypnotic spirit- 
ism rife among the most ignorant. The whole 
idea of its revival was a sheer antiquarian fad, a 
politico-religious masquerade in a frippery of worn- 
out old semi-ecclesiastical clothes. 

With Buddhism, however, it was otherwise. It 
had a deep hold on the popular heart, alike through 
superstition and through elements in itself of depth 
and spirituality. Among its monks and abbots are 
numbered to-day men of the highest birth, the 
noblest character, and the richest philosophical 
culture in Japan. There is now building in the 
city of Tokyo a Hongwangi temple, which in splen- 
dor will rival any that Japan ever saw ; and it is a 
curious fact that, in the work of hauling the beams 
and other heavy material for its construction, six 
great sets of cables, — w r oven entirely of the hair 
of women who had shorn their locks to dedicate 
them to this sacred service — have already been 
worn out, while the seventh set of like cables is in 
daily use. Certainly this attests in Buddhism the 
survival at least of a force of capillary attraction 
that would excite amazement even in a treatise on 
physics, and which surely were hard to surpass in 
the annals of any other form of religion. 

Yet it is these very women that have thus sac- 
rificed to the temple service their crown of glory, 
who are to be most deeply benefited by the revival, 



88 



JAPAN. 



which European Christianity, with its ineffably 
higher ideal of woman, is setting on in Buddhism. 
Dear, gentle, patient beings, they need it, and, by 
all that is ennobling and enriching, they ought to 
have it. So ingrained is their sense of the inher- 
ent inferiority of their sex, so much is there latent 
in their sweet, self-sacrificing natures that has had 
no chance of sympathetic development, so little do 
they dream of what is hidden in the chivalrous, 
romantic love of man to woman, that a marvelous 
revelation is in store for them ; yes, and is already 
breaking, through contact with the womanhood of 
the Occident. 

Here, in truth, in the work of noble Western 
women yearning and toiling for the intellectual and 
moral education of young girls, is a leaven that is 
destined to permeate and uplift the family life of 
Japan. The best thing now in this family life, the 
most spontaneous and beautiful, is the love of the 
little children. Japan is the paradise of childhood. 
But the paradise of the wife it is not. Not for an 
hour would a high-souled American woman endure 
the indignity of the relation as on the average it 
is found. No wonder then, that, with sensibilities 
stung to the quick, such women feel it a sacred 
obligation to strive to lift their sisterhood in the 
East into the higher realm of dignity and honor 
in which they themselves live. Truly, in contrast, 
it is a bit exasperating to read so much that has 
been written on Japan by Americans, — scienti- 
fically keen-eyed, perhaps, but with about the reli- 
gious endowment of monkeys — on the absurdity 
and futility of every kind of mission. 



VIII. 



j Japan has just now readied her ebullient 
Sophomore year in the world-university 
curriculum. No doubt the Sophomore year is a 
stage of inflation necessary to pass through before 
arriving at the chastened dignity of the Senior. 
But it has its temporary perils. Small wonder, 
then, that at present the Japanese are topheavily 
overladen with conceit. Only to think of it ! How 
comparatively few the years since the Imperial 
University of Tokyo was founded under the actual 
title, " An Institution for Examining into the 
Writings of the Barbarians," — Newton, La Place, 
Watt, Lyell, and Darwin, all summed up under that 
engaging category ! Yet already, having squeezed 
whatever they knew out of German, French, Amer- 
ican, English professors, have the J apanese quickly 
sent home the majority of them, and themselves 
taken their places ; as equally they have done with 
European railway contractors, civil engineers, ship- 
builders, and-locomotive builders, and are begin- 
ning to do even with Teutonic brewers of lager 
beer. Did the world ever see the like ! Very 
natural the feeling that they have sucked the 
whole contents of the Occidental scientific orange 
and thrown away the skin. 

Now, it would be entirely feasible to ship on 



90 



JAPAN 



board a New England coaster any bright young 
fellow from Cape Cod, and, putting into his hands 
a sextant and giving him a short run through 
Bowditch's Navigator, in a few days, to enable him 
to take to a hair the schooner's exact position at 
noon. Quite pardonable in him, moreover, would 
it be, should he at first see himself in the light of 
a full-fledged peer of Joshua, who commanded the 
sun and moon to stand still, and they obeyed him. 
None the less might not his mind be set down as 
reverentially incomplete should he fail, on maturer 
reflection, to admit that the Jacob's wrestle of Co- 
pernicus, Newton, and La Place to wrest from the 
heavens their secret was entitled to a modest share 
of credit in the success of the observation. Any 
skilled mechanic can make a sextant, any average 
intelligent youth use it, but behind it lies a race 
of intellectual giants and the sublime mathematics 
of infinite space. 

The art of war, the art of naval construction, 
the art of engineering, the art of organizing com- 
mon schools, universities, upper and lower houses 
of legislation, all these have the J apanese borrowed 
as achieved results from more advanced nations. 
It has been the most stupendous piece of ab-extra 
imitation the world ever saw. But have they bor- 
rowed at the same time the great germinal minds, 
the inventive genius, the depth of character, the 
centuries of political experience, out of which 
these things have come, and which remain to- 
day in Europe and America the potency and pro- 
mise of a vast succession to follow ? The golden 



THE CRUSADING SPIRIT 



91 



eggs Japan no doubt has, but has she the prolific 
intellectual goose to go on laying new ones ? 

Very superficially as yet does J apan take in this 
weighty previous question. Dazzled with excess 
of light reflected from the material triumphs of 
modern European science, she mistakes this for 
the whole core of Western greatness and force of 
character. As she thinks with superior amuse- 
ment of her old theory of earthquakes, how they 
were caused by an enormous catfish nine hundred 
miles long that underlay their main island and 
every once in a while grew so mortally tired as to 
have to flop over for relief on to his other side ; 
and as she contrasts this now discarded theory 
with the complete seismometrical apparatus at the 
Imperial University for measuring the strength 
and duration of every shake ; very properly is she 
as proud as the Cape Cod youth handling his new 
sextant. But what is going to be the outcome of 
such a sudden revolution from top to bottom of 
all old ideas and methods, the J apanese will never 
know until experience shall have made it clear. 
Europe quietly grew into these ideas, Japan 
jumped heels over head into them. It is the sur- 
face questions they have so far attacked. The 
scientific broomstick drudge, after the analogy 
of the old fairy tale, they have set to drawing 
water, and he is deluging the house with it by the 
bucketful; but the formula for laying him, be- 
fore he drowns out the whole family, is another 
matter. 



92 



JAPAN 



^ No one can watch the brilliancy and perfec- 
tion of the evolutions of the J apanese troops, 
can note her huge ironclads and the steady growth 
of her commercial marine, can read her newspapers, 
or catch the spirit of her young men, without feel- 
ing, as it were, on the eve of a new crusade. I use 
the word crusade deliberately. Japan is on fire 
with the sense of a great historical mission. She 
is the ordained champion of the new ideas of the 
West in their advance on the immobility of the 
East. Not the French, when, after their own rev- 
olution, their armies swept irresistibly over the rest 
of Europe, to destroy the last remnants of Feudal- 
ism and to inaugurate the new era of the Eights of 
Man, were inflamed with a more passionate faith 
in a special role of destiny. 

The mercurial temperament has ever proved a 
factor to be reckoned with in human history — 
quite as much so as quicksilver in the thermometers 
and barometers that measure temperature and at- 
mospheric pressure. Again and again, in the story 
of France, from the days of the Crusades to the 
days of the French Revolution, has this tempera- 
ment changed the whole current of European his- 
tory. Quick to adopt new ideas, and chivalrous in 
championing them, France has always been the 
brilliant, even though quicksilver, Abelard of Eu- 
rope, the intellectual Hotspur. Without the leaven 
of her ever-fermenting spirit, how much more 
slowly would have risen the heavier dough of Ger- 
many and England ! True, she has always had 
the " faults of her qualities," and bitterly has she 
suffered from them. 



THE CRUSADING SPIRIT 93 



Now very keenly do the Japanese enjoy being 
called the French of Asia, and not unnaturally, so 
strikingly similar are their virtues and vices. Not 
that the Japanese are in any way the national 
equals of the French. Little do they take it in, 
what a wealth of historic experience and of the 
deepest and gravest thought in literature, morals, 
and religion furnishes the make-weight to Gallic 
lightness, mockery, and impetuosity. Still, much 
is there in the old Samurai spirit of Japan — the 
valor, the patriotism, the artistic courtesy, the loy- 
alty, the contempt of gain — that could easily take 
the place of the chivalry of France, as equally there 
is in this same spirit much that would readily lend 
itself to political experiments of fatal rashness and 
to factional embroilments of internecine ferocity. 

At the same time, along with this quicksilver of 
the French temperament, the Japanese enjoy the 
privilege of an insular position that gives them 
substantially the same advantage in respect to Asia 
that England has always held in respect to Europe, 
and which will render them the great naval power 
of the East. Centuries ago they beheaded the am- 
bassador and destroyed the Invincible Armada of 
the else irresistible conqueror Genghis Khan ; and 
that, too, at a time when all China and much of 
India submitted to his power and to that of his suc- 
cessors. Thus, in the Japan of to-day do we see 
a thoroughly warlike people at a crisis of their his- 
tory in which they have been fused into a unit in 
flaming patriotism and in the intoxication of new 
ideas. In all this lies, I am sure, the prophecy of 



94 



JAPAN 



the coming national Peter the Hermit, who is to 
launch the new crusade of the long-gathering hosts 
of Western thought and civilization on the immo- 
bility of the East. 1 

The Mediterranean has had its great day, 
and still has it. The Atlantic has had its 
great day, and still has it. Now is dawning the 
great day of the Pacific. Face to face with one 
another, on the opposite sides of this mighty ex- 
panse, Japan and the United States, along with 
Siberian Russia, are destined to play an imperial 
role on the stage of the coming future of Asia. It 
is only the beginning of things that is witnessed 
to-day ; but out of the shadowy future already loom 
vague but overwhelming shapes of movements in- 
volving a new destiny for hundreds of millions of 
people. The United States opened this fifth act 

1 This was written before the outbreak of the Japanese-Chinese 
war. Nothing in the results that have followed can surprise any 
one who has studied the situation in the two countries. A fight 
between Japan and China is like a race between two steamboats, 
the one with a paddle wheel on either side, the other with a pad- 
dle wheel on one side and a clumsy oar on the other. In China 
everything is mongrel. She has adopted just so much of West- 
ern science and civilization as has been temporarily pounded into 
her by England and France, and despised the rest of it. Japan, 
on the other hand, has adopted everything to the last military 
shoestring. Moreover, in China, there is no patriotism and little 
or no trust between men. The government is rotten to the core. 
The officer has no faith in his soldier, nor the soldier in his officer, 
nor has either faith that the report of the numbers, the ammuni- 
tion, the provisions on hand, are not totally false. This is one of 
the drawbacks of a system of universal cheating and lying, at 
any rate when applied to the art of war. 



THE DAY OF THE PACIFIC 



95 



in the great drama of historic humanity when she 
sent out Commodore Perry with his fleet, to force 
Japan into the alliance of the nations. Little did 
she dream what she was doing. Now, however, that 
it is done, let the two powers cultivate the friend- 
liest of relations, and feel themselves natural and 
inseparable allies. Above all, outright must it 
be recognized that the day is past for any longer 
regarding Japan from the mere sentimental point 
of view of a land of artistic impressionists. Her 
artisan class, the most deftly-trained and the most 
cheaply fed in the world, is soon to render her 
a truly formidable competitor in the industrial 
struggle of the nations. 

Fascinating has been the experience of a 
two months' stay in Japan, storing the mind 
with delightful memories it will always be a happi- 
ness to revive. The natural beauties of the land 
no words can duly praise, — its chains of pictur- 
esque mountains everywhere ; its seacoast lines, 
varied in outline and steeped in as poetic an at- 
mosphere as those of southern Italy ; its luxuriant 
and profusely varied flora; its innumerable and 
commanding temple sites at Tokyo, Kyoto, Navas, 
everywhere, with their solemn Druid groves. Add 
to all this ever present beauty of nature, the per- 
petual open-air comedy going on in the street life 
of the people, and it will be felt what elements of 
fascination are ever before the eyes of the traveler 
in Japan. So little apparent friction in the 
crowded daily intercourse, such looks of childlike 



96 



JAPAN 



amiability on the faces of the young women ! Call 
these, if you will, only skin-deep, still the skin is 
about all we see of the great majority of our fellow 
creatures, and how far pleasanter is it to look at 
when rippling with smiles than when fretted with 
careworn or angry lines ! In J apan one perforce 
chimes in with Goethe's line, — 

" Am farbigen Abglanz haben wir das Leben." 

So, a loving good-by to the Flowery Kingdom, 
the Land of the Rising Sun, and good-by to all 
these lucubrations on her past, present, and future ! 
She has broken away from the sleep and stagnation 
of Asia, has quit the quiet security of her land- 
locked Inland Sea, and tempted the open main. 
Welcome to the richer and deeper, the far more 
awful, far more sublime inheritance of the best in 
the western world ! May she breathe around the 
sterner elements of this inheritance something of 
her own ineffable charm ! 



CHINA 



L 

j After being subjected for two months, as in 
J apan, to an unintermitting stream of novel 
impressions, what a wonderfully restful experience 
to feel one's self again at sea ! It is like putting a 
tired child into the cradle, and gently rocking him 
to sleep, — at least when kindly Nurse Pacific re- 
frains from setting too thumping a Hibernian foot 
on the rocker and rolling the baby from side to 
side to the croon of a typhoon. No loving mother, 
however, could have been more gentle with treadle 
and lullaby than the Pacific with us, all the way 
from Nagasaki, Japan, to Shanghai, China, and all 
the way from Shanghai to Hong Kong. Oh, the 
boon, each day, of the quiet monotony of the sea, 
unbroken by the intrusion of a whale or a porpoise ! 
How it sponges up all nervously irritating brain 
impressions, and holds them in neutral solution ! 
Indeed, a sea voyage round the world, all the way 
by land, would result in chronic insomnia. So 
blessings on the man who first invented for the 
globetrotter's sanity the sleep of the China Sea 
after J apan ! 

In Shanghai we stopped but twenty-four 
hours. This was long enough, however, to 
furnish a few first-hand impressions of the more 



98 



CHINA 



salient points of difference between the Chinese and 
the Japanese. In Japan one is perpetually inter- 
ested in observing the ways in which the race has 
worked up into its own shapes the ideas, manners, 
arts, manufactures, the architecture, philosophy, 
and religion, originally derived from China through 
Corea. Now at last the chance to see a little of 
the rock from which these Japanese people were 
intellectually and religiously hewn ! A rock, in 
fact, it is in comparison with the sinuous, spark- 
ling, restlessly mobile waters that have ebbed and 
flowed round it for centuries in the Land of the 
Rising Sun. Indeed, striking as is the contrast 
one feels the first time he crosses the Channel from 
France to England, between the lithe, vivacious, 
socially charming characteristics of the one peo- 
ple and the more heavily moulded and undemon- 
strative nature of the other, far greater is the 
contrast experienced on first setting foot on the 
soil of China, after a run of thirty hours from 
Japan. 

In our own country we see but one variety of the 
Chinaman, — the laundry variety, taken from the 
lowest class of the indoor coolies, and cowed, too, 
at that, by the democratic exuberance of our hood- 
lums. He is no more like the breed at home than 
if he had been boiled along with the shirts in 
one of his own laundry-vats, and lifted out on a 
stick shrunk and dripping. In his own land John 
Chinaman is a big, portly fellow, who walks as 
though he owned the earth. He could swallow an 
average Japanese without looking larger. Vanity 



CHINESE CONSERVATISM 



99 



and conceit are no part of him, as they are of the 
Japanese. Indeed, vanity and conceit imply a 
measure of dependence on the estimate of others. 
For four thousand years the Chinaman has lived 
above this weakness, in an indomitable fortress of 
pride. Kealities are simply realities. Ages before 
the European emerged from the lowest barbarism, 
if, indeed, he has yet emerged from it, the China- 
man knew everything and possessed everything 
worth having. He has simply to repeat the past, 
as the planets their revolutions. As for Confucius, 
he had looked into the whole matter of railroads, 
telegraph lines, and the spinning-jenny, forty cen- 
turies back, and dismissed them as beneath con- 
tempt. 

Now, in this light-minded world of ours, it is 
very instructive to fall in with something thorough- 
bred, to see a fundamental principle, like that of 
the " wisdom of our ancestors," stoutly mounted, 
and then ridden, spite of wall or ditch, straight 
across country to its last break-neck logical conse- 
quences. At home in America, we pride ourselves 
on having evolved certain very creditably ossified 
types of the conservative, — now in a sporadic pro- 
fessor, now in a high and dry divine, here in an 
Anglomaniac member of an exclusive club. In 
China, the most obstinately-rooted of these, from 
Boston or New York, would be set up on steeples 
for weathercocks, the only function such variable 
creatures would be thought fit for. 

Never the doggedest aider and abettor of the past 
with us, but inconsistently he will abandon the 



100 



CHINA 



whole principle by giving in to lucifer matches su- 
perseding the flint and tinder box, to gas invading 
the sacred realm of whale oil, or, finally to the 
electric light advancing on the more ancient reign 
of gas. Dignify such thistledown mobility with 
the august title of conservatism ! No ! there is but 
one portrait of an Occidental conservative that 
would awaken in the breast of a Chinaman an emo- 
tion of respect. It was a caricature that was drawn 
fifty years ago in Vienna, in which, on the Day of 
Creation, Prince Metternich was depicted wringing 
his hands in agony and supplicating Deity, " O 
God, let us preserve the Chaos ! " The Chinese 
would have taken this caricature in perfect serious- 
ness, and have set it up in a temple for the edifica- 
tion of the young. 

Custom, then, in China, the thing that has been, 
is the one immutable law of the universe, to be re- 
spected as one respects summer and winter, night 
and day. Do you foreigners cavil that our streets 
are filthy and pestilential ? It is not our custom to 
clean and deodorize them. Do you insinuate that 
our frightful famines and inundations might be 
stopped? It is not our custom to stop famines and 
inundations. Far rather would we die of hunger 
or be drowned out like rats than insult the wisdom 
of our ancestors by such reflections on their time- 
honored ways. Budge, then, the Chinaman will 
not, more than a granite boulder, unless pried out 
with fulcrum and crowbar. Here at last, thank 
Heaven ! the philosophic tourist, weary of such 
pitiful will-o'-the-wisps as we have at home, con- 



SHANGHAI 



101 



templates something as stable in comparison as a 
fixed star to a flighty comet, a wood-tick to a devil's 
darn ing-n e edle . 

For fifty miles before reaching the north- 
erly coast of China, one feels himself al- 
ready developing a fairly " continental conscious- 
ness." It is stirred up from the depths of one's 
being in sympathy with the mud of the Yang-tse- 
Kiang River, poured out on so stupendous a scale as 
to lay down, in vast realms of oozy flats, the pro- 
phetic foundations of a future rice-paradise for mil- 
lions, and still further to spread its turbid flood over 
countless square miles of otherwise bright blue sea. 
The eye looks on with awe at so enormous a process 
of world-building. Nothing, one feels, but a vast 
continent, with far-away ranges of colossal moun- 
tain chains, mighty river systems thousands of 
miles in length, can furnish the material for such 
work as this. Bread enough to feed four hundred 
millions of mouths, and all this fertilizing mud to 
spare ! surely this must be China ! 

Sailing up one of the streams of the immense 
delta, stretching along the coast a hundred miles, 
our steamship anchored off Wusung to take in 
cargo, while her passengers in a little steam-launch 
ran up the river fourteen miles farther to Shang- 
hai. 

^ Europe and China hobnobbing ! such is 
the scene Shanghai presents ; only that the 
hobnobbing is done arms-length, centuries-length. 



102 



CHINA 



race-length, apart. Here, on the one hand, a beau- 
tiful European city ; open to breeze and sunshine ; 
with stately buildings and lovely gardens ; its 
broad, park-like quay, shaded with rows of trees, 
running along the river, and everything breathing 
sweet and healthful air ! There, on the other hand, 
a Chinese walled town of 200,000 inhabitants, its 
streets narrow and filthy, its people pigging in to- 
gether in tenements which are perpetual breeding- 
places of disease ! Cheek by jowl, for fifty years 
have stood these two cities ; the one steadily aspir- 
ing after growing beauty, comfort, healthfulness, 
the other serenely satisfied with its aboriginal per- 
fection. Shakespeare and the Chinese are at one 
in the feeling that — 

" To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, 
To throw a perfume on the violet, . . . 
Is wastefuf and ridiculous excess.'' 

As over against two such authorities, far be it 
from me to express a personal judgment. I am a 
simple reporter of impressions, a disinterested ob- 
server of the ways of my fellow-creatures, as they 
have been subjected to their varying planetary de- 
velopment. All I see is the reason why these two 
cities have not exerted a whit of perceptible influ- 
ence on one another. The English, French, and 
Germans still follow their own ever-changing meth- 
ods. If there is a new and promising-anti-cholera 
mixture, they take doses of it, to decide which is the 
better man, cholera or mixture ; a new germ-killing 
disinfectant, they set on a free fight between it and 
microbes ; a new astronomical or metaphysical the- 



SHANGHAI 



103 



ory of the universe, they import the book describ- 
ing it, and here and there one of them, perhaps, 
reads it. Of all this freakiness of the innovating 
temperament, scarcely a trace in China town ! 
Foul smells, cholera, bacteria, have their prescrip- 
tive rights to be treated in accordance with the 
wisdom of our ancestors, and are so treated, to the 
mutual satisfaction, apparently, of germ and human 
germinator, as they develop amicably together. 
So long, then, as the two have mastered the art of 
thus living in happy concord, why inaugurate be- 
tween them the internecine warfare set on by the 
Englishman ? 

Now, to one just arrived from Japan, here is a 
vastly instructive sight in the way of comparative 
historical study. Through the force of a precisely 
similar object lesson, the same fifty years in which 
all this has been going on in Shanghai have revo- 
lutionized the other country. The moment the 
Japanese got a chance to see a better thing in the 
way of disinfectant, Herbert Spencer Scott's Emul- 
sion of Cod Liver Oil, astronomical observatory 
for studying the real motions of the celestial bodies, 
they adopted it. Peremptorily, on the other hand, 
the Chinese despised and rejected it, on the abso- 
lute ground that no good thing could come out of 
the Nazareth of " outside barbarians " and " foreign 
devils." Their logic was perfect, though their 
premise may have been an instance of too hasty 
induction. 

Contempt is a dangerous, though no doubt a 
soothing quality. Not that the Europeans do not 



104 



CHINA 



entertain it liberally toward the Chinese. But the 
return contempt of the Chinese in their pig-sty city 
for the dwellers in the clean, beautiful European 
city is, in comparison, colossally vaster. It is a 
contempt Atlas in height, continental in breadth, 
oceanic in depth, — a contempt in ssecula sseculo- 
rum. One is awed by it. One yearns for a mas- 
siveness of nature capable of so Mt. Blanc a solid- 
ity of contempt-sensation. I repeat it, something 
sublime is there in beholding for once the virtue of 
conservatism developed to Himalayan proportions. 
If Confucius really did this, all of himself, then I 
rank him next to the law of gravitation. 

Kind, though no doubt nationally preju- 
diced friends in Shanghai had strongly 
advised my friend and me not to attempt an explo- 
ration of the Chinese city. They said it was some- 
times perilous to life and limb, and at all times an 
exposure to infectious disease, and that for twenty 
years they had not thrust their own noses inside 
the walls. None the less we went, and went 
alone, — with reprehensible traces in our breasts, 
I fear, of that physical contempt for Chinese 
prowess engendered in the American mind by home 
contact with none but the bleached-out laundry 
species. For hours we strayed at our own sweet 
will, penetrating all quarters, and frequently get- 
ting hopelessly lost, only at last to find ourselves 
again. The tastelessness and ugliness of the scene 
to one fresh from Japan was the main impression 
tha sordid materialism of aspect everything wore. 



SHANGHAI 



105 



No doubt there were plenty of good, patient, excel- 
lent people there. No doubt there was many a 
learned pundit ruminating the Chinese classics in 
many a house we passed, and, let us hope, thanking 
Heaven he was not as either of those two u foreign- 
devils " going by. Still, no use is there in at- 
tempting to account for Chinese Shanghai on the 
score of its being a seaport town, corrupted by the 
imitation of foreign manners and vices. The 
trouble with it is that it has imitated nothing, has 
kept itself so simon pure in its ancestral nastiness. 

None the less, how strong and cheerful the 
people looked ! What an effective system here on 
hand for killing off the sickly and feeble, and leav- 
ing none but the cholera and small-pox-proof ! The 
survival of the fittest for standing such conditions 
of foul air, crowded quarters, barbaric medical 
treatment, such was the principle of natural selec- 
tion palpably at work. Still, one man's meat is 
another man's poison ; as equally experiments in 
natural selection require successive generations to 
work in. So at last my friend and I began to doubt 
our personal fitness to survive much longer. The 
one predominant feeling with us both, as we 
emerged from the gate, was a longing to be hung 
out for a month on a clothes-line, in a gale of wind. 
Carbolic acid and chloride of lime seemed perfumes 
of a rarer fragrance than heliotrope or tea roses. 

However, a drive of several hours out into 
the country now effected an aeration quite 
as brisk as hanging out on a clothes-line, along 



106 



CHINA 



with wider advantages for enjoying scenery. Very 
depressing the aspect, it must be admitted, that is 
imparted to the immediate surroundings of this 
especial Chinese city by the enormous stretches 
given up to burial-places for the dead. Here, if 
anywhere in China, — especially when it is re- 
called that ancestor worship is the devoutest form 
of religion that prevails, — one would look for some 
imaginative expression of sentiment, some touch of 
beauty or ideality, as in all the cemeteries of Japan, 
where a like ancestral faith is rife. No suggestion 
is there of any craving akin to this. Few or no 
trees, no charm of greensward and constant floral 
offerings, no venerable moss-grown monuments, 
nothing but low mounds of naked or weed-grown 
soil, and these by the million ! Perforce, one calls 
up the endless stretches of prairie-dog burrows on 
the Colorado and Montana plains, only to be filled 
with the same dazed wonder there evoked as to 
how each several prairie-dog household ever con- 
trives to feel sure of its own domestic hole. With 
such back-lying successions of departed ancestors 
to keep in ever green remembrance, it must be a 
liberal education in itself to know just where to 
find them. 

Once, however, out beyond these dreary wastes, 
there opens up a sight that cannot but inspire deep 
reverence for China. The marvelous cultivation, 
the patient, untiring industry that wrings the bread 
of millions out of the soil of these vast river bot- 
toms, the cheerfulness and solid, practical good 
sense of the farming people here is something to 



SHANGHAI 



107 



call out deep-rooted respect for millions of human 
beings under such stern stress of the law, 4; In the 
sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou 
return unto the ground." 

No wonder these people are averse to change ! 
They have reached a state of stable equilibrium. 
They have got adjusted like the patient ox to the 
yoke, know just where it presses and how best to 
ease it, and do not want to be readjusted to a new- 
fangled one. Century-old products of these monot- 
onous levels, these sluggish rivers and canals, these 
uniform methods of cultivation, their muscles have 
become solidly set to a plodding gait and their 
brains to a gait equally plodding. Expatiate, if 
you will, to a heavily moulded plough horse on the 
exhilaration felt by the fast trotter, and invite him 
on to the track to share it ! The plough horse 
might be misguided enough to make a spurt for 
twenty rods. Far more settled in his solid mus- 
cular convictions, the plodding Chinese country- 
man ! 

No ! to do over again the same old thing in the 
same old way, to think over again the same old 
maxim in the same old way, this is to " possess the 
earth." Nerves have they none. Of the heights 
of ecstasy, the abysses of despair, these modern 
physiological inventions entail on other unfortunate 
people, they are stolidly oblivious. They can sleep 
under a lullaby of gongs, and with wide-open 
mouths full of meandering flies. What big bodies 
and big bowling-alley-ball heads of real lignum- 
vitae texture ! While European nations are ex- 



108 



CHINA 



hausting in excitement their nervous energies, these 
fellows are storing theirs up ; lying fallow a few 
thousand years, as did our vast western prairies 
against the grain crops that should one day be de- 
manded of them. True, their existence now is 
commonplace and matter of fact, largely devoid of 
ideality, devoid of imagination. Of anything like 
the life of chivalrous love for woman, of consecra- 
tion to an ideal of a great future for humanity, they 
know little and care less. Still, one cannot but 
feel there is latent in them the stuff of a giant 
future, after once the mighty throes of revolution 
that are at hand shall have steeped them in scald- 
ing tears and chilled them in icy waters and forged 
them under the trip-hammer blows of sure-coming 
destiny. 

VII ^ ere ' ^ ar down ^he river, as we are 

driving back, we see looming up a huge 
ironclad. It is Chinese. On the river-bank, 
farther yet below, stretch the long lines of a power- 
ful modern fort. It is Chinese. What do these 
mean? They mean that a power mightier even 
than century-old Chinese conservatism is on the 
field, that Europe has already invaded and par- 
tially conquered China with the ideas of a new age. 
True, these ideas had to be driven home by the 
thunderbolt of war. They were never accepted 
of free choice, as in Japan. When England and 
France destroyed China's fleets of junks, took Can- 
ton, took Pekin, then China had to begin to think 
on new lines, had to submit to the crowbar prying 



SHANGHAI 



109 



out some of the sullen, dogmatic boulders deep 
sunk in the tenacious soil of her mind. Hauling 
down the imperial flag from the Pekin palace was 
as nothing to hauling down the flag of the century- 
old monomania of ancestral pride. But down it 
had to come ; and perforce China sent to Europe 
for military engineers, ship-builders, drill-masters 
for her troops. Forts were constructed, arsenals 
and ship-yards founded, schools of instruction es- 
tablished, — only of course to be suffered to fall 
into gradual decay. None the less the iron wedge 
of destiny had entered, and begun to split rifts in 
the tough old gnarled log. And now to all this is 
added the terrible gadfly of Japan anchored just 
off her coasts ; the gadfly become a hornet on a 
mission, with all the modern scientific apparatus at 
its tail's end for stinging home the inflammation 
of the new ideas. One stands hushed in awe to 
reflect on what all this inevitably involves in the 
future of four hundred million people. 



II. 



^ It was a charming run of three days from 
Shanghai, and never before in life did I 
chant more rapturously the rarely quoted line of 
Gray, " Where ignorance is bliss," than on sailing 
at sunrise through the strait that winds its pictur- 
esque way into Hong Kong harbor. About the 
island of Hong Kong, whether it was flat or per- 
pendicular, prosaic or picturesque, I knew abso- 
lutely nothing. Suddenly, however, on stepping 
out on deck, what should be the revelation but a 
magnificent archipelago of islands like Mt. Deserts, 
though on a hundredfold grander scale ! One 
could have weeded out a dozen Mt. Deserts without 
leaving the marine paradise before the eyes a whit 
less attractive. Then came the sail through the 
strait, a mile to two miles in width, and shut in 
on either hand by mountains. The coloring was 
indescribably beautiful. Largely naked of vegeta- 
tion, their tops covered with dry bamboo grass, and 
their flanks a mingling of red granite and of red, 
yellow, and whitish clays and gravels, they fairly 
palpitated in the glow of the semi-tropical sun. 
Indeed, as I later found, this vivid glow charac- 
terizes the aspect of the mountains all day long. 
Look out over the harbor, even at noon, and you 



HONG KONG 



111 



would think the ranges, completely environing it, 
were steeped in warm sunset light. At home we 
find fault with our sunsets, beautiful as they are 
while they last, because just as we are fairly yield- 
ing ourselves to the rapture of them, the curtain 
is rung down and they are gone. Here in Hong 
Kong this little aesthetic objection is removed by 
keeping them flushed and aglow all day long. 
Perhaps, in China, even sunsets have grown con- 
servative, and dislike to change. 

Once through the strait and into the harbor, the 
city itself is another delightful surprise. With 
only a narrow selvage of level ground along the 
water, its houses, many of them spacious and no- 
ble mansions, with beautiful gardens, rise, terrace 
on terrace, up the flank of an abrupt mountain, 
eighteen hundred feet high, it topmost summit 
crowned with villas and hotels in which Euro- 
peans seek refuge from the overpowering heat of 
the summer. One would think himself in Genoa, 
so strikingly similar is the architectural effect. 

Only forty years ago this beautiful island was a 
nest of Chinese pirates. Even at a far later date, 
a European took his life in his hand if he ventured 
alone a mile out of the settlement, or embarked at 
night in a sampan for his ship. To-day, in charm- 
ing contrast, the most blind-drunk sailor, with just 
consciousness enough left to know he wants to be 
rowed out and put aboard at midnight, has the 
segis of his country lovingly extended over him 
in the shape of a gilt-buttoned official taking the 
number of the sampan, giving it just fifteen min- 



112 



CHINA 



utes to get back, and, in event of an instant's over- 
stay, firing a signal that forthwith sets the harbor 
swarming with armed launches. Thus by one 
electric flash of the higher civilization is murder 
discouraged in the Chinaman, and the mind of the 
European seafaring man relieved from the cor- 
rosion of anxiety as to just how much it may be 
wisest to drink ashore. Why the superiority of 
such a system is not immediately apparent to the 
Celestial mind is a standing marvel. And yet the 
sampan-scullers still insist that the older way was 
the better. 

Very curious does it seem, indeed quite inter- 
national, to find that the policemen in Hong Kong 
are big red-turbaned Sikhs from India. It gives 
one a fresh conception of the resources England 
has to draw on. Equally curious is it to inspect 
the immense Chinese quarter of the city, with 
nearly a quarter of a million of inhabitants, and 
to see how much in the way of wider streets, 
sweeter sanitation, and the subjection of small-pox 
to the quill is possible. Not that it will do to 
make too hasty an induction that this is one proof 
more that the " quill is mightier than the sword," 
for here the two divide the honors. The quill 
has a hilt and a strong arm behind it to drive it in. 
" Hinc illce lachrymce " when the British doctors 
go round 3 along with some savage fights for " the 
wisdom of our ancestors." But Hong Kong be- 
longs to England, and here the "foreign devil" 
has his own " outside barbarian " will. 



CANTON RIVER 



113 



Canton lies ninety-five miles away from 
Hong Kong, up an enormous river, which 
— for fear of misspelling it, should I attempt the 
Chinese name — I will call, as the English do, the 
Canton River. We embarked at five P. M. on a 
fair-sized steamboat, the lower deck of which was 
littered with a swarm of third-class Chinese, pigging 
in together ; while the upper deck was set apart, 
forward for respectable Chinese, and aft for Eu- 
ropeans. The respectable Chinese furnished their 
own bedding and opium, and lay, cheek by jowl, 
beside one another ; while the Europeans had state- 
rooms to themselves, with soap, towels, and other 
foreign prejudices. 

Scarcely had we started when an American lady 
came up to me in anxiety, and asked, " What 's 
the reason there is a sword in my room? " Indeed, 
pistols and rifles were everywhere lying around 
handy ; but the lady in question, who had never 
at home observed on the Fall River boats this 
especial kind of life-saving apparatus, seemed 
greatly nonplussed. So, to relieve her feelings, I 
was forced to tell her that the sword was for her to 
defend herself with to the last gasp, if the Chinese 
should attempt to seize the boat, murder the pas- 
sengers, and loot their trunks : further calling her 
attention to certain strong iron gratings that had 
been let down and clamped over the gangways from 
the lower to the upper deck. She at once became 
composed, as the New England woman always is 
when she learns the reason why. 

These little preliminaries were not indications of 



114 



CHINA 



a purely sportive fancy on the part of our captain. 
Many the steamboat that has been served this turn 
by pirates in the guise of passengers, the last in- 
stance occurring but two years ago. Our own trip, 
however, proved entirely uneventful ; and we could 
only hope that the swarm on the lower deck had 
not had their feelings unduly hurt by the seeming 
distrust implied in the iron gratings. Still, it was 
to be set down as another agreeable and romantic 
surprise to find piracy still so rife in these waters, 
and to learn how many desperate encounters, 
involving the destruction of whole fleets of pirati- 
cal junks, it had taken to bring matters even to 
so comparative a state of safety as the present. 
Indeed, in Canton itself I found the native river 
passenger-boats — stern-wheelers, worked not by 
steam power, but by the leg power of coolies on 
a treadmill — were armed to the teeth with cannon 
and smaller arms in the way of cutlasses and guns. 
It seemed odd to think of such a state of things 
existing on the interior water-ways of a vast em- 
pire, until I began to ask myself how long ago 
it was since Dick Turpin was distinguishing him- 
self in the immediate neighborhood of London by 
overhauling reverend bishop on Hounslow Heath. 
Furthermore, one of our party made disagreeable 
allusions to holding up trains and looting their 
passengers on some of our own American railways. 
But these last are only infrequent interludes, when 
the cowboys are feeling a little playful. Here they 
are the chronic thing. 



CANTON RIVER 



115 



Never to be forgotten is the scene presented 
by the Canton River population. Here in 
their sampans and larger boats are born, live, and 
die a quarter of a million of people. They have 
no dwelling-place ashore. A diminutive section 
of the stern of the boat, covered with a matting, 
and often not over seven feet by four, is parlor, 
kitchen, bedroom, birth-chamber, death-chamber, of 
the whole family. With her baby tied on her back, 
the mother sweeps the heavy scull, while the older 
children take as naturally to the oar as ducks to 
their web-feet. Indeed, the women, as a general 
rule, command the boat, steer it, and make the 
bargains. As the phrase runs, " She bosses the 
boat, and her husband bosses her." But boss the 
boat she does, and a delectable sight it is to watch 
her skill. A ripple of indication that there is a 
fare of any kind, and fifty sampans dash for the 
spot like a flight of Florida turkey-buzzards sud- 
denly cognizant of a dead dog. The melee that 
ensues is simply indescribable. Babies' heads, 
on the backs of their mothers, rolls round like a 
planetary system of bowling-alley balls, the centri- 
petal force, however, so exactly balancing the cen- 
trifugal as to prevent their flying off into space. 
Sampans clash, thrust, and lever one another. 
The smaller children sit, or are jounced, in pa- 
tient, impassive, Oriental imperturbability, while 
the father and the older ones poke with bamboo 
poles or fling themselves on their backs and skill- 
fully kick at critical stages of the maternal tactics. 
Each family is a cooperative unit, for success 



116 



CHINA 



means rice or no rice. Thus for miles the surface 
of the great river seems one successive human ant- 
heap, wriggling, with bamboo poles for antennae 
and oars for nimble legs. 

^ Arriving as we did in Canton at the break 
of day, we had the best of chances to witness 
the religious devotions of the countless river swarm, 
consisting in the discharge of fire-crackers from 
each separate boat, to scare away the devils. Never 
before had we seen on so impressive a scale the 
practical application of the maxim, " Fight the 
devil with fire ! " and the spectacle inevitably led 
to certain profound speculations on the relation 
between business and religion. To supply the need- 
ful missals and breviaries for the morning devotions 
of such millions, the manufacture of fire-crackers 
in China must be on an absolutely colossal scale. 
Imagination refuses to grasp the numbers of powder 
and paper mills thus literally " rooted and grounded 
in the faith." Should foreign missionaries convert 
the millions of their customers to a creed prescrib- 
ing a less noisy and more inward form of morning 
worship, total financial ruin would at once stare 
no end of manufacturers and workmen in the face. 
Forthwith would they band together to a man 
to destroy in blood the " execrable superstition." 
New and vivid light thus broke on Saint Paul's 
rough experience in Ephesus with the makers of 
images of Diana, till, just as the streets of that city 
rang with the cry, " Great is Diana of the Ephe- 
sians ! " so one seemed to hear all over China a 



THE SHAMIEN 



117 



mob of ferocious voices shouting, " Great is the 
Fire-cracker as a Devil Fighter ! " 

To see a familiar Scripture passage — worn so 
threadbare by repetition in the common pulpit — 
thus suddenly lighted up with such a blaze of fire 
and bang of emphasis, acts as a powerful imag- 
inative stimulant to the traditional mind. Besides, 
it enlarges charity. If as sympathetic a tear as 
Laurence Sterne could shed comes stealing down 
the cheek for the ruined paper and powder manu- 
facturers of China, why should it be thought un- 
christian to indulge in another as genuine over 
Alexander the coppersmith, and his poor fellow- 
craftsmen in Ephesus ? Nay, were it venturing 
on a yet more reprehensible latitudinarianism of 
stricture to aver that even the little tots of the 
Chinese children on the sampans evinced a live- 
liness of interest in the morning devotions, not 
always manifest in those of the same immature age 
at family worship at home ? Yet, we are forever 
insisting on the supreme importance of making 
religion attractive to the young. 

In Canton, we were to be the guests of old 
and dear American friends, living in the 
large and beautiful park, the Shamien, the conces- 
sion ceded by the Chinese government for the resi- 
dence quarter of foreigners. This park, a mile and 
a quarter in circumference and surrounded on all 
sides by the river and by wide canals, makes a 
little bit of heaven in contrast with the crowding 
and squalor of the city within the walls. To it we 



118 



CHINA 



were rowed down through the hurly-burly of the 
river, and oh! the blessed change of getting ex- 
tricated from the mob of boats, mounting the steps 
of the high stone wall, and finding ourselves greeted 
under the banyan-trees, and again in the big, wide- 
verandahed, hospitable house, by such true-hearted 
friends. Breakfast announced, how eagerly we fall 
to work discussing a tender beefsteak and still ten- 
derer memories of loved ones at home ! Beautiful 
as the lotus flowering out of the mud, such, and 
more than such, the sight, out of the mud of the 
relation between man and woman in China, of a 
loving American husband and wife, and a bevy of 
sweet children to kiss. 

No doubt the grace of charity is a beautiful 
thing, but ever with the proviso that a line is some- 
where drawn between it and self-stultification. It 
does not, then, seem to me invidious to say that the 
man who has ever had a mother, sisters, a wife, 
daughters, and lived with them in the richer, deeper 
relations habitual among ourselves, who does not 
start back as before an abyss of spiritual bru- 
tality at the contemplation of what, in comparison, 
even the ideal of these relations stands for in China, 
is simply to be ruled out of court as incompetent 
to express any comparative social judgment. Not 
that there need be one whit of praise or blame, one 
ascription of personal merit or demerit in such 
judgments, more than in comparing a rose with a 
cabbage. None the less there breathes an atmos- 
phere of sentiment around the one that is wanting in 
the other ; and just this prosaic lack of any atmos- 



CANTON 



119 



phere of sentiment is what makes China the cabbage 
of the nations. 

^ Breakfast over, we found that ample pro- 
vision had been made by our host for our ex- 
ploration of Canton. Four chairs on long bamboo 
poles, with three coolies apiece to bear them on their 
shoulders, stood ready, — one for the guide, one 
for our host, and one each for my friend and my- 
self. Soon we were mounted aloft, and away 
trotted our coolies out through the leafy Eden of 
Shamien into the Inferno of Canton. On entering 
the walls of the city I took it for granted that the 
inscription over the gateway must read, " All 
hope abandon, ye who enter here ! " 

It is useless to try to describe an experience of 
seven hours within the walls of Canton. The thing 
must be seen, heard, felt, and smelt. I desire to do 
absolute justice to this mighty city of a million in- 
habitants, the Paris of China, as it has been called, 
and so freely admit at the outset that Shanghai 
seemed to me to bear off the honors in the variety 
and differentiation of nauseous smells engendered. 
In Canton the effect produced is, if I may use the 
term, more composite, — a blending of all the va- 
rieties in one heavy, fetid odor, akin, I take it, in 
an inverse way, to what is aimed at by French 
chemists in the perfume called "Mille Fleurs." 
But analysis is useless in such cases. I can only 
say that the smell of Canton is more massive, more 
metropolitan. 

Even in our sparsely settled country, it is often 



120 



CHINA 



said that there are too many people in the world. 
Ah! to what nightmare dimensions the sense of 
this grows in Canton ! The streets are from five to 
eight feet wide, the houses on either side are high, 
the slit of sky above is shut out by mattings, and 
the throngs pouring along are ceaseless, repulsive- 
looking, offensive to the touch. Of course, we, 
lifted on high on the shoulders of our coolies, es- 
caped the push and elbowing, and, like the gods on 
Olympus, could look down serenely on the steaming, 
struggling humanity beneath us. Now and then 
we would meet the chair of some other Olympian 
mandarin like ourselves, coming the other way ; 
and then the question of squeezing by threatened 
to become international. 

Such, in outward aspects, was for hours our pas- 
sage through the enormous city. There were few 
open squares, no park oases of trees, flowers, and 
water v no fine architectural effects, no ample and 
beautiful temple grounds. The largest open area 
embraced the dwelling and gardens of the former 
Manchu governor, which the English, on taking 
Canton, had insisted should be ceded, in token of 
submission, as the site of their own consulate. Per- 
haps the next area in size surrounded the Temple 
of Horrors, full of life-sized figures undergoing the 
tortures of the Buddhist hell, an area so crowded 
with hucksters, fortune-tellers, gamblers, beggars, 
and thieves as to elicit from my friend the remark 
that the " hell outside was as striking as the hell 
within." But we had made up our minds to do 
Canton, declining no invitation to go anywhere but 



CANTON 



121 



to the execution grounds to see some heads chopped 
off. To the vermin-ridden prisons we did go, in 
which among other wretched beings in heavy chains, 
we saw one poor woman enduring a ten years' sen- 
tence. On my asking a high civil official what had 
been her offense, he answered that it was because 
her son had committed murder. Whereat, to my 
further query as to why she was thus punished for 
his crime, he replied, " Because she did not give 
him better advice." This seemed to me the patri- 
archal system of China with a vengeance. I may 
have drawn a wrong inference from the words, but 
do not think I did, as the law-officer spoke admira- 
ble English, and seemed to think the reason ought to 
satisfy any rational mind, as it failed to mine, for 
lack, no doubt, of a due sense of my own mother's 
responsibility for all the scurvy things I have done 
in life. 

And yet, in contrast with all this outward ugli- 
ness, what a different world was opened upon visit- 
ing one after another a series of the little manufac- 
tory shops. Oh, the exquisite silks and satins that 
were unrolled, the fairy-like ivory carvings that 
were brought out, the delicate filigree work in gold 
and silver, the beautiful embroideries we saw grow- 
ing under deft fingers before our eyes ! The bronzes, 
the porcelains, so marvelously finished, so harmo- 
nious in tints and dyes ! And to reflect that all 
this had been going on centuries ago as to-day, go- 
ing on when we as peoples were sunk in barbarism ! 
What a beehive of industry the mighty city ! What 
legions of patient, cunning, tasteful craftsmen, 



122 



CHINA 



working their twelve and fifteen hours a day ! 
What temperamental phlegm of calm in every fibre 
of body and mind, along with such quiet cheerful- 
ness ! 

True, there is no indication of any high spirit- 
ual ideals of the beautiful or of the sublime in 
the models they so deftly imitate. Again, as in 
J apan, comes the thought 66 Great in little things, 
little in great.' 9 While in Greece and in Grecized 
Italy, hosts of just as clever workmen reproduced 
in endless number the statues of Phidias and 
Praxiteles, the paintings of Apelles, till the poorest 
households possessed them in niches and on their 
painted walls, here nothing is reproduced but nests 
of carved ivory balls delicate as gossamer, grace- 
ful designs in lacquer, grotesque dragon shapes 
in bronze, wavy sheens in silk. The contrast is not 
raised for censure, but for clearness of impression. 
China never evolved anything in the shape of an 
artist sublimely inspired in thought or imagination. 
Prosaic in the presence of this higher world, what 
poetry she has works itself off in pretty and gro- 
tesque fancies. The great models of a nation, not 
its skillful imitators, is it that determine its stand- 
ing in the realms of art, literature, philosophy, and 
religion. 

No sight in all Canton is so full of interest 
and so explains the genius, or rather lack of 
original genius, of this mighty nation, as what, for 
want of a better expression, might be called the 
Examination Halls of the countless candidates for 



CANTON EXAMINATION HALLS 123 



positions in the civil service, the one opening to a 
career in China, from the grade of the most ordi- 
nary functionary to that of prime minister. China 
has no hereditary nobility. The highest place is 
free to the lowest man, and all through education. 
An ideal programme truly ! — if carried out in the 
spirit as well as in the flesh. 

To call up before the untraveled American a 
vivid picture of the Examination Halls of Can- 
ton, the most practical thing would be to refer 
him point blank to the cattle-yards of Chicago, 
covering with their acres on acres of pens such vast 
areas of space. Then, should he mentally subtract 
from each several pen its ox, and substitute for him 
a Chinaman with ink and hair-pencil and paper, he 
will realize the whole scene as distinctly as if he 
were on the spot in China. In Canton, there are 
12,000 of these pens, one for each of the 12,000 can- 
didates. In this he is shut up by himself for three 
days and three nights, then let out for three, then 
returned for three more, at the end of which time 
he is supposed to have written out all the answers 
to the examination papers. Not infrequently a 
candidate is found to have died in his pen of 
anxiety and exhaustion ; but there are plenty to 
take his place. Indeed, fairly appalling is the 
stress of competition. Sometimes, out of the 
12,000, not over one or two hundred pass the or- 
deal which enrolls them among the literati, and ren- 
ders them eligible to place in the public service. 
Still, the contest is renewed, till it is no very un- 
common thing to find men of over eighty, and at 



124 



CHINA 



times of over ninety, once again volunteering in 
the forlorn hope. The mind is awed at an illus- 
tration of the struggle for life on a scale as stupen- 
dous in the world of letters as that of the codfish 
and herring for survival in the sea. 

What, however, is the nature of this terrible 
ordeal through which the successful candidate 
must pass ? In what classes of studies is he ex- 
amined, and with what probable results on intel- 
lect, character, imagination, and ideal of life ? The 
Chinese classics, the work of national sages who 
lived thousands of years ago — these, with the enor- 
mous commentaries on them, are the fountain- 
heads of knowledge from which the candidate is 
supposed to derive all his light. Great men were 
these sages, who digested many a pregnant thought, 
but who along with this elaborated a system of 
ceremonialism in manners so vast and intricate, a 
labyrinth of artificial formalism so confusing, that 
it is the study of a lifetime to know just what to. 
do and what not to do on each public or private 
occasion, while yet it is civil and moral death to 
fail to know it. Fifty French dancing-masters 
condensed into one would remain a composite un- 
tutored barbarian in etiquette, in comparison with 
what is demanded of an average Chinese candidate. 
Memory is, then, the one intellectual faculty that 
counts most. The slightest departure from pre- 
scription, worse than a crime, is a ceremonial 
blunder, and a ceremonial blunder outweighs in 
deep-dyed guilt a whole catalogue of crimes. 

Here, then, is a principle of natural selection 



CANTON EXAMINATION HALLS 125 



that weeds out from the start all variations from 
the permanent specific type. Variations are the 
black sheep of the flock, to be killed off outright, 
lest they should affect the uniform color of the in- 
tellectual wool. Should, by any freak of nature, a 
single pen be found infected by the presence of a 
sporadic youthful Harvey haunted with a new idea 
of the circulation of the blood, by a sporadic youth- 
ful Jenner mentally poisoned with the virus of 
vaccination, his career would end on the spot. As 
for a youthful Goethe, venturing in his examina- 
tion paper on the wild suggestion that the human 
skull might be shown to consist of modified verte- 
brae, measures so stringent would at once be taken 
with his own vertebrae, that, in his case at least, 
no further demonstration of the truth or falsity of 
the theory would be available. No ! every trace 
of innovation, every hint of a new idea, is the 
worse than worthless girl baby to be incontinently 
drowned. Thus is the Chinese man's head sub- 
jected to the same kind of aborting clamp as the 
Chinese woman's foot, with the like result of a 
life-long intellectual toddle. 

Discouraging, then, to anything akin to origi- 
nality of mind as this stupendous system must be 
admitted to be, bread and butter, career, wealth, 
dignities, all turn absolutely on never deviating 
into originality. The very name of originality is 
but the synonym not for mere lack of veneration, 
but for positive delirious desire to trample on the 
sacred images of Confucius and Mencius. None 
the less for the attainment of the great practical 



126 



CHINA 



object it has in view, namely the grand anti-Dar- 
winian demonstration of the permanence of species, 
at least in China, this vast educational system be- 
longs among the most impressive spectacles in hu- 
man history ; achieving its end more perfectly and 
on a vaster scale than have any of the most potent 
educational systems — the Spartan, the Venetian, 
even that of the Catholic Church with its priest- 
hood — the world has ever seen. While it weeds 
out originality, — the one bane of the immutable 
conservatism it would maintain, — it none the less 
unerringly selects the class of minds most effective 
for the end it has in view : men of strong health 
capable of enduring the severest strain ; men of 
powerful memory of endless details ; men of horse 
logic never troubled about premises ; men in whom 
automatic repetition of the most intricate system 
of ceremonialism has replaced every impulse to 
spontaneity ; men, in fine, who can decorously in- 
troduce more in the way of unimpeachable moral 
maxims into the preamble of the worst government 
" squeeze " than elsewhere can be paralleled. Thus 
has been fashioned the chilled steel die with the 
irresistible weight of pressure to force it home, 
through which one authorized image and super- 
scription has been stamped on the mental coin of 
the empire. 

Yjjj Plato's dream, in his Eepublic, of a gov- 
ernment administered solely by philosophers 
has in China been brought down from the sky of 
fanciful speculation into the solid world of beef and 



A GOVERNMENT OF PHILOSOPHERS 127 



pudding. Concrete in every atom, as soon would 
the Chinaman think of separating a boulder from 
the force of gravitation inherent in it, as theory 
from practical every-day embodiment. No need, 
therefore, for him to go with Plato to Syracuse to 
hunt up an amiable, progressive tyrant to serve for 
a pou sto from which to work his philosophic 
lever. He takes his stand just where he is, and 
begins to pry away. 

Now this ideal of a government by philosophers, 
or saints, or the two combined, is one that through- 
out human history has exerted a spell of fascination 
over the higher order of minds. To them it has 
stood for the legitimate reign of reason over chaos, 
of virtue over vice, — the only reign worthy the 
allegiance of a noble nature. Stupendous the scale 
on which the Brahmins strove to carry out this 
ideal in India; the Egyptian priesthood, in the 
valley of the Nile ; the mediaeval Catholic Church, 
in Europe ; although in each of these great instances 
philosophy was inseparably bound up with theology. 
Here, in China, on the contrary, the colossal experi- 
ment has been on a purely mundane foundation. 
" Respect the gods, but keep them at a distance ! " 
Heaven is their realm, China ours. Let them hoe 
their row, while we hoe our own ! 

Sooner or later, every great race gets a lawgiver 
or prophet made in its own image, while reacting 
in turn on the race itself through the mass and 
momentum of his own greater personality. Mo- 
hammed was, tooth and nail, the fiercest Bedouin 
in all Arabia, though a highly sublimated Bedouin. 



128 



CHINA 



Gautama Buddha was the most absolute type of 
pessimist in all India, though carrying the habitual 
cheerfulness that is so unfailing a characteristic of 
pessimists to greater lengths than is possible with 
men in whom traces of optimism still survive. 
Look now at Confucius, the colossal man in whom 
first embodied itself the vast Mongolian race, only 
to be reacted on by the weight of his enormous 
return pressure ! China, always traditional, made 
him, and then he re-made China. Impossible is it 
to speak of the man but in terms of wonder, rever- 
ence, and love ; as equally impossible is it to 
escape a half humorous smile at the prosaic, mat- 
ter-of-fact, dead-level respectability of certain sides 
of his intelligence and character, — the measure, 
no doubt, of traditional Mongolian alloy requisite 
to fit his fine gold for a circulating medium tough 
enough to withstand the wear and tear of China. 

Confucius said of himself — too much reverence 
for the wisdom of his ancestors had he not to say 
it! — that he was " not an originator but only a 
transmitter." Of the sin of originality — literally 
the " original sin " of China — he sought to shake 
his skirts clear from the start. Yao and Shun, cer- 
tain impossible paragons of perfection in the way 
of mythical Chinese kings of the past, were held 
responsible for all his ideas, — kings apart from 
whose august sanction he would never have ventured 
on the impiety of entertaining ideas at all. Very 
much with the same solemnity of conviction might 
Newton have averred, of his own relation to the 
law of gravitation, that he was simply a transmit- 



A GOVERNMENT OF PHILOSOPHERS 129 



ter of the long-established goings-on of the ancestral 
planetary system, indeed, had never gone a hair's 
breadth beyond a literal statement of what had 
been its venerated custom from the beginning. 
Well, if Confucius was not an original mind, an 
original character, an original forecaster of human 
destiny, then the doctrine of evolution should be 
allowed its own sweet will in resolving back all 
human personalities into the aboriginal pregnancy 
of the nebular mist ! 

The grand, wise, humane man, so benevolent and 
compassionate, so sagacious, so sweet and humor- 
ous, so consecrated to his mission, so devout, too, 
in his deep, though unimpassioned way! More- 
over, such a sincere believer in Yao and Shun, and 
in the doctrine that manners make the man and 
that the two are one and inseparable ; in fine, in 
the immutable truth that there are at least three 
thousand external postures which, being reveren- 
tially assumed, become so many channels for the 
inflow into the soul of corresponding interior graces 
of genuine courtesy ! So exceptionally rich, too, in 
the man was his native soil of goodness that no 
doubt he could live up to every one of the three 
thousand external postures and inform them all 
with the spirit, whatever may be said of the dry 
rot of formalism and insincerity they have set on 
in the hearts of his countrymen. 

Such a literal and matter-of-fact believer in the 
kingdom of heaven on earth as Confucius, the 
world never saw. Heaven meant to him an om- 
nipotent, ever-embodied, tangible presence in the 



130 CHINA 

world now and here of a grand, orderly, beneficent 
law that need only be recognized and obeyed, and 
lo ! its kingdom, the kingdom of heaven, was on 
hand. Here was the sublime side of the great 
sage. Profound was his insight into the laws of 
nature which alone can establish the well-founded 
state and family, and for all this China owes him an 
immeasurable debt. But now comes in the racial 
and personal limitation of the man, namely, his 
overpowering faith in the method of working from 
outside to inside. People at large, to use his own 
favorite expression, are like so much water, which 
always assumes the exact shape of whatever dish it 
is poured into. If only, then, he could fabricate 
the right kind of morally-shaped dish out of a few 
rules, all the rest desired would follow of itself. 
In all this, in his own lofty way, he believed as 
profoundly as the most commonplace pie-maker in 
his own power to make all his pies come out alike, 
if only he can subject their common dough to one 
and the same fluted tin-cutter. 

Unhappily, on just this fatal inheritance from its 
mighty sage is founded the vast Chinese system of 
education for a government by philosophers. Of 
course it requires an immense supply of philoso- 
phers to fill all the offices of so immense an empire, 
while alas ! by definition, a philosopher is a man 
who thinks, and yet most men do not think except 
in a sadly lopsided way. Not for a moment, how- 
ever, does the practical Chinese mind suffer itself to 
be balked by any such purely theoretical difficulty. 
First-hand thinking enough, it says in substance, 



A GOVERNMENT OF PHILOSOPHERS 131 



has already been done, and done supremely well. 
The moral-sage dish has been shaped to absolute 
perfection. Now squeeze into the mould, like so 
much clay, all candidates aspiring for place, and 
they will be turned out so many regulation-sized 
philosophic bricks, each one of them an exact copy 
of Confucius, repeating the same thoughts, never 
deviating from the same methods, and all able to 
imitate to a hair the same endless posturings. Thus, 
the most careless mind can hardly fail to be struck 
with certain salient points of difference between this 
brick-yard system pursued at Canton and the freer 
system adopted, say, at Harvard. Truly, a serious 
comparison of the Canton examination papers with 
those in use at any American or European college 
furnishes one of the most comically interesting and 
instructive historical studies that can be indulged 
in ; and, if entered on soberly and discreetly, — a 
state of mind not so easy to maintain, — will throw a 
flood of light on China not to be gained from read- 
ing a dozen portly volumes. Let me modestly com- 
mend it to teachers of history in Harvard, Yale, 
or Columbia. Specimens of Chinese examination 
papers are easy to get at ; for example, " The China 
Review," vol. viii. No. 6. 

That such a system, carried out on so stupendous 
a scale, should prove a potent cause of national ar- 
rest of development is of course inevitable. Not 
that among the literati of China there have not been 
in every generation acute thinkers, and men of pro- 
found feeling and lofty character. No system can 
utterly destroy in powerful natures the germs of 



132 



CHINA 



intellectual curiosity and native love of virtue, 
that, spite of every obstacle, will assert themselves. 
European scholars long resident in the country 
assert that from time to time books appear — 
secretly circulated indeed and hard to get hold of 
— that are characterized by strong, independent 
thinking. Indeed, such scholars further insist that, 
just as when great, overshadowing forests are cut 
down, an immediate regrowth of trees of a different 
species sets in, trees already on hand as plantlets 
and only awaiting a chance at sun and air, so would 
it prove in China with the upspringing of a new 
and vigorous mental growth, could only the present 
great Mandarin forest have the axe laid at its roots. 
Meanwhile, however, this forest continues to spread 
the deadly mildew of its shade over every tiny 
nursling, and thus does the mind and heart of the 
average educated Chinaman become mere punk and 
powder, while outwardly he flourishes like the green 
bay tree, through the simple activity of his external 
bark. 

Such, then, is the system of education that sets 
its stamp on the politico-literary officials of China, 
the men who impart the tone to the ideas and pol- 
icy of the empire. Thence spreads to the people 
at large insincerity and deep-rooted distrust be- 
tween man and man. From top to bottom, as is 
admitted on all hands, government is honeycombed 
with corruption. The one honest service in the 
empire is the collection of customs, and that is ad- 
ministered by Europeans and Americans, because 
there China cannot help herself. With no concern 



A GOVERNMENT OF PHILOSOPHERS 133 



with government, the people scarcely know the 
meaning of patriotism ; indeed, when the English 
and French were besieging Pekin, cities all round 
made private terms for themselves, supplying in 
return provisions, bullock-carts, and coolies, — the 
same thing as if, were Boston besieged, Salem, 
Lynn, and Worcester should agree to furnish all 
the beef, hay, and horses the enemy needed, so only 
that they themselves were let alone. Thus so hol- 
low a shell as the Chinese Empire nowhere else 
exists ; while none the less bodily and in latent men- 
tal capacity the Chinese are one of the most power- 
ful races on the globe, — far the superiors of the 
Japanese in solidity of mind, in business capacity, 
in potential depth of thought and persistence of 
will, in almost everything but artistic sensibility. 1 

1 And yet a conflict between China and Japan has turned out 
like a fight between an ox and a hornet, in which the hornet, able 
to get in everywhere and the ox nowhere, the big", helpless bovine 
runs bellowing across the plain. So much will stereotyped rou- 
tine and too protracted addiction to Yao and Shun do with a 
mighty people. 



THE TROPICS 



j Feom Hong Kong, on a radiant December 
morning, we set sail on the German steam- 
ship Oldenburg for Singapore ; and as the bracing 
winter weather had depressed the mercury as near 
the freezing point as 80° Fahrenheit, we got away 
in a fine exhilaration of spirits for the veritable 
Tropics. That Kaiser Wilhelm II. had close at 
heart keeping warm tender memories of the Vater- 
land in the breasts of his subjects, even in the 
farthest East, was made clear, not alone by the 
lively fluttering of the national flag aloft, but by 
the stirring strains of the Wacht am Ehein from a 
German brass band, and, deeper yet, by the broach- 
ing on deck of a keg of ice-cold Bavarian beer; 
this last a bit of symbolism as enthusiastically 
repeated each morning and afternoon of the voy- 
age as the sunrise and sunset salute of the colors 
enjoined on the army at every military post. 

Not, however, that due courtesies were not 
equally shown to the deepest national sensibilities 
of China. From our bows hung suspended an im- 
mense festoon of at least two hundred and fifty 
packs of fire-crackers ; and if ever the devils were 
duly warned off from any ship, they were from 
ours when these started their spitfire fusillade. As 
large numbers of Chinese emigrants were steerage 



136 



THE TROPICS 



passengers, it was comforting to a humane mind 
to feel that they no doubt were experiencing a 
quietude of peace commensurate with the scale of 
the noisy thaumaturgic manifesto. Thus West and 
East met and kissed one another, as Teuton and 
Chinaman were made happy, each in his chosen way. 

Far back in early boyhood days, when 
assiduously neglecting his studies at school, 
one none the less may have received some single 
impression which all through life has remained 
indelible. It was wrought, perhaps, on the imagi- 
nation by a little view in his " Pictorial Geogra- 
phy " of the island peak of Teneriffe, — a view in 
which a perpendicular, snow-crowned mountain 
pierced sheer through the clouds into the upper 
sky, while at its base lay a ravishing dream of 
naked Negro boys, cocoanut-palms, sugar-cane, and 
heavily-laden banana-trees, all basking in a lan- 
guishing atmosphere of peace, in which it seemed 
impossible that school should ever keep. Many 
the cent, no doubt, he had invested in bits of cocoa- 
nut, and even in cocoanut-cakes. But here was a 
land in which an ingenuous boy needed only duly 
to aggravate a monkey to procure gratis in return 
a volley of the blessed nuts, and then retire to the 
grateful shade, punch holes in the welcome mis- 
siles, and drink their delicious milk. Cows, as 
lacteal fonts, seemed prosaic in comparison. From 
that date followed a veritable passion for the 
tropics that haunted him through life. Such, at 
any rate, was my own child experience. 



SINGAPORE 



137 



In Singapore I felt sure of the genuine thing, 
— no miserable compromise, like Florida, between 
winter and summer, frost and fever, where a tiger 
would be subject to pulmonary complaints or a 
python too sluggish from cold to embrace with due 
fervor a deer. The region I craved must lie close 
to the equator and under the vertical sun. Its 
inhabitants must be innocent of clothing, lest the 
beauty of their bronze or jet-black bodies should 
be impaired. Flaming red turbans and red loin- 
cloths they might wear, to be in keeping with the 
equally flaming flowers of the jungle, but beyond 
this, nothing. The huts must be thatched with 
palm-leaves, the bread must grow on trees, the 
coffee-berries must thrust themselves in through 
the windows and ask to be plucked, roasted, and 
decocted ; cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves must drop 
spontaneously into the bread-fruit pudding, duly 
to flavor it ; while mangoes, mangosteens, and pine- 
apples should voice their bewildering rival claims 
to furnish the luscious dessert. 

Such was the blissful dream, as day after 
day we floated over summer seas, without 
the change of a degree in the direction or an 
increase for an hour gentle pressure abeam 

of the northeast monsoo It was the poetry of 
sailing, in which it seemed tnat captain, crew, ship, 
and engines might all be lapsed in a long sweet 
siesta and no harm could come on such charmed 
waves. How tender and considerate, too, the 
geological providence that, in thrusting out the 



138 



THE TROPICS 



Malay Peninsula a thousand miles, till it nearly 
touched the equator, had made such kindly provi- 
sion that no planetary pilgrim should be able to 
girdle the earth without this tropical experience ! 

Singapore, a possession of Great Britain, — 
what does she not possess ! — lies at the extreme 
southern point of the Malay Peninsula, and is 
only two degrees from the equator. I begrudged 
the two degrees ; but one cannot have everything 
in a world so imperfectly constituted. The actual 
settlement is on a little island, not, however, so 
far from the mainland that a tiger cannot swim 
over from the domain of the Sultan of Johore, to 
pick up an appetizing native whenever so disposed. 
Visited with constant showers, it combines in its 
blazing sunshine and abundant moisture the condi- 
tions of the most exuberant tropical luxuriance. 
A richer variety of nationalities, moreover, could 
hardly be coveted by the most exacting ethnologist. 
To specify a few, there are Achinese, Africans, 
Arabs, Armenians, Bengalis, Burmese, Chinese, 
Dyaks, Javanese, Malays, Manillamen, Parsees, 
Persians, Siamese, Tamils. Singapore, in fine, is 
the great central meeting-place for the trade of 
China, Japan, Java, the Malayan Archipelago, 
India, Arabia, Abyssinia, and Europe, and is full 
of residents from each. 

It was just after sunset that our steamship glided 
into the harbor, and so late before we were finally 
tied up to the pier that we hardly cared to venture 
ashore for the, night. Indeed, two young men, 
who started out in search of a hotel, returned 



SINGAPORE 



139 



by midnight in a sadly demoralized nervous con- 
dition. They had secured a sleeping-room, but 
found that its tenancy was of the nature of the 
Box and Cox arrangement, in the familiar farce. 
Box was in occupancy. He was a huge serpent. 
In vain the landlord offered another room. They 
precipitately retired to the ship. None the less, 
their report looked so promising in the tropical 
way that the rest of us waited impatiently for the 
dawn. 

How beautiful the dawn, and what a story was 
told to the finite little tourist as to his real posi- 
tion on the planet by the great sidereal clock of 
the heavens ! Close down to the horizon in the 
north hung the pole star ; while at fifteen degrees 
of elevation in the south stood the constellation of 
the Southern Cross. Gradually, absorbed in the 
excess of light of the rising sun, they vanished 
from sight. 

^ With sunrise began the bustle of day ; and, 
as I looked out on the side toward the town, 
the first grateful sight was a rude cart drawn by 
a veritable pair of the cream-colored, humped- 
back, reversed-horn cattle, so familiar to all fre- 
quenters of Barnum's Circus. They were driven 
by an almost coal-black Tamil, in a bright red 
turban and red loin-cloth, — a piece of such fine 
naked realism that the great moral showman 
would have had essentially to modify it before pre- 
senting it to the decorous American public. None 
the less, over the cattle I could not help exclaim- 



140 



THE TROPICS 



ing : " They look as natural as though under their 
native tent on the Back Bay, Boston ! " On the 
other side of the ship, however, was soon revealed 
a spectacle such as Barnum in his most inspired 
hour would never have ventured on. Immense 
barges, filled with sacks of coal, each swarming 
with fifty or more naked fellows, equal in anat- 
omy to any of the gladiatorial saints in Michel 
Angelo's Last Judgment, and who would have 
driven the austere and self-contained master wild 
with enthusiasm, had come out to coal our ship. 
Ex tempore scaffoldings were erected, on the 
various stages of which the men stood in ranges, 
heaving from one to another the heavy sacks. No 
conceivable attitude of grace, strength, and agility 
but was struck ; and such pure, unmitigated enjoy- 
ment of superb legs, and loins, and backs, and 
sinewy shoulders, I never reveled in before. Ah ! 
why do not our artists come oat to the tropics to 
pursue their studies ? We talk of our life-schools 
in New York and Boston, where a few fatty, aca- 
demically posing, half -asleep models are set up to be 
drawn from at so much an hour. Life-schools ! 
Schools of death, in comparison with what is here 
before the eyes! These fellows, lifting, tossing, 
catching, re-tossing the two-bushel sacks of coal, 
have never heard of the Greek Laocoon, or the 
Discus-thrower, or the Athlete with the Scraper. 
But they are spontaneously enacting them at every 
turn, as free and unconscious in doing it as 
the runners and wrestlers Phidias looked on and 
sketched at the Olympian games. 



SINGAPORE 



141 



y The first thing on leaving the pier was to 
hire a gharry, — a small carriage drawn by 
a wiry little pony, capable of eight miles an hour 
under a heat of ninety-five degrees. The gharry 
has a thick roof, and is open on all sides, with 
slat-screens to draw for protection against the sun. 
As for the driver, he is simple perfection in the 
way of the picturesque, whatever he may be in mor- 
als. Malay by race, with a large piece of highly 
variegated silk wound round his waist, and falling 
in folds as a petticoat, with a scrupulously white 
tunic over his shoulders, and a red turban of stu- 
pendous dimensions on his head, he looks an 
Oriental sovereign cabman, with whom one feels 
at first as chary of bargaining as with the Grand 
Sultan. So figurative is he, however, in the style 
of his first financial proposition that one soon sees 
it would be utterly prosaic and Occidental to take 
him literally. A reduction to one third of the 
original amount is finally agreed on ; and then his 
Magnificence mounts the seat, and starts off the 
little pony like a shot. 

What a drive we took ! The road was excellent, 
as it always is where imperial England or imperial 
Rome rules the province. On we whirled past the 
spacious, beautiful bungalows of the Europeans, 
the porches wreathed with a wealth of purple 
bourgainvillia vines, and splendid with flaming 
poinsettias and hibiscus, and picturesque with 
palms ; past the villages of Malay houses, set up 
on piles in swampy districts ; past the clay huts of 
the country people, thatched with palm-leaves and 



142 



THE TROPICS 



buried in thickets of banana, bread-fruit, and jak- 
trees, lightened up with the infinitely varied colors 
of the crotons. The last native town we had seen 
was heart-sickening Canton, its depressing mem- 
ories and smells still clinging to the skirts of mind 
and coat. Now everything was sunny, happy, 
open-air life. Poverty is nothing in such a cli- 
mate. What need of care where one can bring 
up a daughter to marriageable age for about three 
dollars ! The more children, the merrier. At 
every step my friend and I were pulling one an- 
other right and left to say : " Did you see this ? 
Did you see that ? " Now it was a young mother, 
with such a glory of a little naked bronze child 
astride her hips ; now an interior of Adamic in- 
nocence around the common dish, into which all 
dipped their five-pronged natural forks ; now a 
fruit-seller, with such a strange variety of luscious 
specimens unknown by very name to us. 

Then, too, the superb flora was all so novel It 
was a universal Kew Gardens with the glass roof 
off. Jak-trees and calabash-trees bearing fruit so 
heavy that it would brain Og, Gog, and Magog, if 
it fell on their skulls ! Clumps of bamboo ninety 
feet high and a hundred yards in circumference ! 
Magnificent bread-fruit-trees, each separate leaf a 
miracle of size, lustre, and beauty of form ! Ban- 
yan-trees, striding across country each like a hun- 
dred-armed vegetable Briareus, making after the 
Titans, not on all-fours, but on all eager hun- 
dreds at once ! Enormous rubber-trees, their whole 
gigantic root system lying exposed above ground, 



THE BOTANICAL GARDEN 143 



coiling and recoiling on themselves like an acre of 
huge boa-constrictors ! Who but has wished at 
times in life that some Titan might deracinate for 
him a giant oak, and hold it up that he could 
see at once the whole aerial superstructure, and 
the whole terrestrial substructure, and marvel at 
such a creation? Well, the grand, century-old 
rubber-tree gives one just this sight. One would 
think a Titan had torn it out of the ground, and 
then set it up, balanced and supported on its roots. 
The effect is that of Tennyson's " Flower in the 
Crannied Wall" raised to the ten-thousandth 
power, and with proportionate increase in the 
volume of the religious awe inspired. Yes, the 
school-boy's dream of Teneriffe had all come true ; 
and the heart chimed in with Wordsworth's lyric 
burst : — 

" So was it when my life began ; . . . 
So be it when I shall grow old, 
Or let me die ! " 

^ Among the most interesting sights in Singa- 
pore is the Botanical Garden, in which are 
brought together the greatest possible varieties of 
tropical trees, shrubs, vines, and flowers. A great 
botanical garden ranks as a sort of vegetable 
anthology of the poetry of the natural creation, in 
which, within comparatively narrow bounds, all the 
choicest extracts from the genius of the Amazon, the 
Indus, the Ganges, the Irrawaddy, and the islands 
of the sea are brought together. Unassisted nature 
tends to run all to nutmegs, or cinnamon, or royal 
palms, or bread-fruit, or bamboo ; and so art must 



144 



THE TROPICS 



step in to insist that every one of, say, two hundred 
and fifty varieties of palms shall have a chance to 
reveal its glories, and that perambulating banyans 
shall not be permitted to stride at will over the 
whole country. Permanent aboreal settlers there 
have their rights, as well as irresponsible vegetable 
tramps. The Botanical Garden, moreover, possesses 
another immense advantage in the way of mental 
peace. There, while the pleasure-seeker is inspect- 
ing the trees, he is freed from the necessity of stand- 
ing up to his waist in a Borneo swamp, or keeping 
one eye out for an emulous boa-constrictor, or mis- 
taking the stripes down a tiger's back for the sheen 
of a clump of small golden bamboos, and thus 
falling one more unwary victim to that dishonest 
" imitative principle in nature " so fitted to deceive 
the very elect. The aesthetic gain is immense. 

All the voyage south from Hong Kong, my 
traveling companion and I had been reading 
with keen delight Wallace's " Malay Archipelago." 

How infinitely more vivid in interest every page 
now that we were actually entering on the vast 
island regions of Borneo, Celebes, Sumatra, J ava, — 
that veritable El Dorado of the East which the 
Portuguese fought for from 1500 to 1600, the 
Dutch from 1600 to 1700, and the English through- 
out the present century ! In none of the chapters 
of Wallace's book had we found greater pleasure 
than in the descriptions of his hunts in Borneo 
after the orang-utan, and his studies of the ways of 
that Caliban of the forests. What, then, was our 



A BORNEO PHILOSOPHER 



145 



delight at finding in the grounds of the Singapore 
garden a full-grown specimen of the brute ! 

The especial Borneo gentleman in question 
stands four feet two inches in height, while his fore 
arms more than touch the ground as he walks erect, 
after the most monstrous biped-quadruped fashion 
one could dream out in a nightmare. Covered with 
long, black, matted hair, and adorned with a red 
beard, he is further dowered with protruding jaws 
powerful enough to chew up whole cocoanuts and 
spit out the shells as easily as ours crush grapes 
and get rid of the skins. This, however, is but the 
Caliban side of the creature, the lower, elemental, 
evolutionary force that is now in travail with a 
higher spiritual force. Immense, then, was our 
surprise, on studying him more closely, to find that 
above his brute jaws arched a noble, philosophic 
brow, and under it lay a pair of profound, medita- 
tive eyes that irresistibly reminded one of Immanuel 
Kant. The contrast was fairly startling. Here, 
then, in epitome, was the whole creation groaning 
and travailing in pain until now, waiting for the 
adoption, to wit, the redemption of the brute body ! 

Our Borneo philosopher occupied an apartment 
twenty feet each way, with a bare tree in the mid- 
dle, and shut in on the four sides and at the top by 
heavy iron gratings. In his periods of contempla- 
tive abstraction, the attitude assumed for his medi- 
tations differed from that I have read of as char- 
acteristic of any of the great German metaphy- 
sicians. Clinging to the centre of the iron grating 
at the top by one fore hand and one hind hand, the 



146 



THE TROPICS 



other fore arm was swung clear round the back of 
his head to support its cerebral weight, while the 
still remaining hind arm grasped the fore arm 
employed in actual suspension, the whole resulting 
in a perfection of pendent equilibrium which one 
felt must most essentially conduce to the harmoni- 
ous balance of his intellectual faculties. Irresisti- j 
bly he suggested the famous picture, in the Clouds j 
of Aristophanes, of Socrates suspended in the bas- 
ket and lost in aerial contemplation. From time 
to time a mischievous little monkey would run 
across the top of the grating and twitch the hair of 
the brooding philosopher, who then would slowly 
turn his head and look at him with an abstract 
gaze that saw and yet saw not. 

Absolutely convinced were my friend and I that 
the great book on the true philosophy of evolution 
was then and there being brooded out. Thousands 
of years may elapse before it shall be permitted to 
issue from the press ; but then will it assert itself 
as the work of one subjectively and objectively 
authorized to expound the vast theme, of one having 
all the slime and the lotus flower, all the brute and 
the angel, in his own compound organization. For 
now, in an instant, a revelation of the two contra- 
dictory elements in our arboreal Immanuel Kant ! 
In the levity of our own minds growing weary 
of such protracted meditation, we would ask the 
keeper to bring a lot of paw-paws, when, lo ! in a 
flash, the Caliban would dominate the philosopher ; 
and down the gratings would he climb, working 
across the floor with an inconceivable monstrosity 



A BORNEO PHILOSOPHER 147 



of brute awkwardness, and cramming the paw-paws 
into his terrible jaws. The brute in his nature laid 
to rest, again would the profound thinker resort to 
his aerial suspension, and resume the thread of 
broken contemplation. Oh, that Robert Browning, 
with his deep psychical insight, could have seen 
him ! There was material there for a profounder 
poem than " Caliban on Setebos." Browning's 
Caliban had no outreaching, prophetic element in 
him. In this Caliban it was impossible not to feel 
it working, — an elemental, slowly differentiating, 
secular force ! 



CEYLON 



j There is a Mohammedan legend that, after 
their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, 
Adam and Eve were penally transported to Ceylon. 
How inconceivably beautiful must Eden have been 
if Ceylon was looked on in comparison as a sort of 
Botany Bay ! Personally, I would brave the conse- 
quences of barrels of forbidden fruit for one day of 
exile there. As to the truth of the legend I cannot 
vouch, further than to attest that the shallow strait 
dividing Ceylon from India is called Adam's Strait, 
and one of the highest of the mountains Adam's 
Peak. Readers of the Indian epic, the Ramayana, 
will further recall that this was the strait bridged 
by the king of the monkeys, to enable heroic Rama 
to rescue his stolen wife, Sita. 

On our voyage from Singapore, all the way 
through the Straits of Malacca and across the great 
southern ocean, we carried with us the same beau- 
tiful weather and smooth seas that had favored 
us the entire course from Japan. December 21 
we sighted Ceylon in the late evening, and before 
ten o'clock the next morning had skirted the whole 
southern coast of the island, then turned northward, 
and rounded the great breakwater into the harbor 
of Colombo. Very beautiful was the sight from 
our steamship's deck. The handsome Renaissance 



150 



CEYLON 



architecture of the great hotels and government 
buildings along the quay, the immense, sweeping 
curves of the rose-tinted beaches, backed by forests 
of cocoanut-palms, and behind them the lofty peaks 
of the mountains of the interior, combined in a 
charming picture. 

How one envies England the possession of so 
superb an island as Ceylon, two thirds as large as 
all Ireland ! And how one must praise the mag- 
nificent way in which she administers its affairs ! 
She is the legitimate successor of imperial Rome. 
Ruthlessly may she conquer, but in the train of 
conquest follows the broadest, the wisest, the most 
humane and tolerant statesmanship the world has 
ever witnessed. To be humbled by her is to be 
exalted by her. For back of the greedy, unscru- 
pulous, mercantile adventurers and half pirates 
that are the first aggressors, lies the great truth- 
speaking, justice-loving, Christian civilization of 
the home nation, ever with its Edmund Burke, or 
kindred moral genius, to voice the deeper sentiment 
of the people for righteousness and mercy. What 
a noble breed of men the proconsuls she has sent 
out to rule a realm like India, — men heroic in 
courage, supremely loyal to duty, enlightened in 
intellect, devout in feeling, an honor to humanity, 
their biographies a more than modern Plutarch ! 
Blessed the nation that has such constellations of 
worthies with which to fire the soul of its more 
generous and aspiring youth ! 



AN ARYAN PEOPLE 



151 



The first drive on the island, one unbroken 
succession of fascinating tropical pictures, 
alike in the luxuriance of the vegetation and the 
grace and color of the Singhalese and Tamil men, 
women, and children, brought home to my friend 
and myself one exulting feeling, to which both gave 
hearty expression. "Heaven be praised! we are 
once more among an Aryan people ! Blood is 
thicker than water ! " Here were our own features, 
our own caste of thought and feeling, our own 
image cut in bronze or ebony. What if we did set 
out from our common home countless centuries ago, 
one branch of the family wandering to the farthest 
confines of India, and the other bringing up at 
last in San Francisco ! Across the vast abyss had 
we ever, consciously or unconsciously, yearned in 
thought and aspiration, and when at length our 
great literatures came together, we found we had 
the same fond words for father and mother and 
hearth and home. I felt like hugging and kissing 
the whole Aryan race. For, be it confessed, the 
dreary weight of the vast Mongol-Malay race had 
for months been oppressing my soul with nightmare. 
Wherever I had struck it and whatever I had read 
of it, whether in Thibet, Tartary, China, Mongolia, 
Corea, Japan, or the fairly continental Malay 
Archipelago, it had seemed to me one and the same 
thing, devoid of deep inwardness of feeling, an 
exterior mask of manner, incapable of any of the 
achievements that are dearest to us, — the epic and 
drama of Homer and Kalidasa, of Dante and Shake- 
speare, the music of Beethoven and Mozart, the 



152 



CEYLON 



sculpture and architecture of Asia Minor, Persia, 
and Greece, the chivalrous worship of woman, the 
philosophy of Germany and India, the religion that 
has dowered Syria, India, and Europe with its 
hierarchy of saints. All in vain is it to say that 
the majority of Aryans know nothing of all this. 
They do : it is in their blood, in their literature, in 
their common speech, in their whole spiritual edu- 
cation, and ever ready to flower out afresh. But 
in the vast Mongol-Malay stock so wanting is it 
that, whether any given American, German, or 
Italian traveler is capable of analyzing the matter 
or not, or can only express his sentiments by pro- 
fanity ; he feels the ethnological fact by instinct, 
recoils from it, and is oppressed by it. 

However brief his stay in Ceylon, the trav- 
eler generally spends a few days in Kandy, 
some eighteen hundred feet above the sea, among 
the mountains of the interior. Kandy is now 
reached by a railway, — a marvel of engineering 
skill, hardly, to be surpassed by anything the world 
shows ! Indescribable the view, as one skirts the 
flanks of the mountains, and looks down into an 
enormous gorge, its sides clad with the most varied 
and luxuriant foliage, and its streams winding 
among the trees and level bottom lands below, 
transformed into cascades and lakes of the ex- 
quisitely delicate green of the young rice ! In- 
deed, in Ceylon the glory of the tropics fairly cul- 
minates. One would not believe it possible" that 
such a sense of indescribable happiness could be set 



KANDY 



153 



welling and gushing from the worn and weary heart 
by the mere presence of this luxuriant exuberance of 
nature. The influence is irresistible. Life's pain 
and grief seem absorbed into it, swallowed up by it, 
mantled all over, as it so quickly mantles its ruins 
with gorgeous flowering vines and stupendous trees. 

Arrived in Kandy, one finds himself by the shore 
of a charming little lake, its banks embowered in 
wide-branching tamarind-trees and royal palms, 
and, above, diversified by the vine-clad bungalows 
of the European tea-planters. Close at hand is the 
picturesque little Malagawa Buddhist temple, the 
most sacred shrine on earth of Buddhism ; for there 
is preserved for veneration an actual tooth of Bud- 
dha, which, though once sacrilegiously stolen by 
the Portuguese, and carried to Go a in India, and 
there solemnly burned to lime in the presence of a 
great concourse of ecclesiastics, still offers its merits 
for the edification of the faithful. As the tooth is 
two inches and a half long and one inch and a quar- 
ter broad, skeptics have doubted its human authen- 
ticity. Their cavils left me unmoved. Already 
had I seen, in two widely separate places, footprints 
of Buddha in granite, six feet, at least, in length. 
So far, then, from finding anything disproportion- 
ate in the size of the tooth, it served as a confirma- 
tion of my wavering faith in the footprints. Of 
far greater importance, however, is the fact that 
in this temple are preserved the ancient Pali texts, 
which bring the student of to-day into the nearest 
contact with original Buddhism that can now be 
had. 



154 



CEYLON 



It was on Christmas Eve that we arrived 
in Kandy, and by sunrise the next morning 
I was out to greet in the tropics the blessed day. 
Child of the wintry North, where was I ? No 
sound of sleigh-bells jingled on the frozen air. 
No frost-nipped imagination suggested overcoat or 
mittens. The charming little lake close at hand 
breathed, indeed, its invitation — not, however, to 
skim with skates its icy surface, but to jump into 
its bosom for a delicious swim. In circuit a mile 
or more, it was overhung with royal palms, — the 
the most beautiful of all the palms, — and with 
century-old tamarind-trees, dipping the feathery 
tips of their branches into the water. A wealth of 
flowering vines — scarlet, purple, gold — climbed 
every tree-trunk and festooned every cliff. Close 
at hand was the Buddhist monastery, and on its 
steps the yellow-robed monks and acolytes chanting 
their hymns and prayers. Men, women, and chil- 
dren on the road greeted me with a winning charm 
unknown to our angular race, their beautiful eyes 
suffused with a Nirvana-like peace, which, though 
their lips uttered no Merry Christmas, yet breathed 
its loving spirit on the air. Thus gently saunter- 
ing along, I completed the circuit of the lake to 
where its waters overflow in a plunge thirty feet 
down into a lovely pool. Then what a picture ! 

Men, women, and children were reveling in 
their early morning bath, — the men and boys 
rioting in splendid somersaults from the cliffs ; the 
women huddled together more apart, but laughing 
and chattering in the merriest way. And now 



CHRISTMAS IN KANDY 155 



the genuine Christmas-gift spirit revived in my 
heart. No pent-up Utica of presents, as at home, of 
fur gloves and knit hug-me-tights longer contracted 
my powers. My soul expanded in tropical exuber- 
ance. I yearned to be an Indian prince with 
ample means to create crystal-clear Diana baths 
like this for happy people in Massachusetts to 
leap into on every early morning of December 25, 
— the blessed season of the year, when, as all New 
Englanders so well know, the air is so deliciously 
warm, the water so seductive in its invitation, and 
the pleasure so exquisite of lying out in the golden 
sunshine to dry. 

On Christmas Day, if ever in the year, a prin- 
ciple of pure disinterested sympathy with the joys 
of others should be the dominant note of the soul. 
Yet, how much easier is it to be thus unselfish 
under certain conditions than under others ! No- 
where, for example, the man who shares a more 
absolute faith than I in the tonic virtue of a zero 
winter climate, — especially shares it when lying 
out in luxurious ease in the tropics. • That day, 
then, I felt so disinterestedly glad for all the dear 
ones in America, so thankful that they were expe- 
riencing the fine exhilaration of the snow and ice 
tingling in their blood, and that their cheeks were 
so ruddy and their appetites so whetted as with a 
scythe-stone. No trace of envy breathed a stain 
on the smooth mirror of my soul. Their super- 
abundant energy, their freedom from any desire 
for a moment's rest, their magical power of extract- 
ing sunbeams from anthracite, their capacity to 



156 



CEYLON 



get pleasure out of one little evergreen bush, in 
alleviation of tlie bare, wind-lashed oaks and 
maples around them — yes, it seemed so graciously- 
delightful to lie stretched out under a tamarind- 
tree, and to contemplate all this as the happy lot of 
others. Whole groups of them could I see, in my 
mind's eye, holding on tight to their hats and 
bonnets as they staggered out from their front 
doors to face the blizzard, while congratulatingly I 
cried : " Ah ! that is the making of a hardy, brave, 
virtuous, and much-enduring people. Long may 
you be subjected to it ! " 

In the tropics, the sense of the sweetness of rest 
carries with it a primal, elemental meaning it can 
rarely share in a far northern climate. In Mas- 
sachusetts, for example, it is Tennyson's poem of 
"Ulysses," the gray-haired old mariner, who at 
eighty is too nervously restless to sit down in 
quiet for an hour by his fireside to reflect on past 
experience, but must be projecting some new seal 
or walrus voyage to Baffin's Bay or beyond ; it is 
the "Ulysses" that carries the day in attraction 
over any, poetry of dreamy rest like "The Lotos- 
Eaters." While " The Lotos-Eaters " is an ex- 
quisite rendering of the inmost essence of the Bud- 
dhistic ideal of Nirvana, the only ideal of Nirvana 
that appears to sanction repose to the average 
American housekeeper, haunted by seven dust 
devils that will not go out of her, or harried by 
her exacerbated conscience into an endless vortex 
of committee meetings, seems to be the final goal 
of fairly earned collapse in nervous prostration. 



CHRISTMAS IN KANDY 157 



Then first is her moral being temporarily at peace. 
" I would if I could ; but, if I cannot, how can 
I ? But ache hard, O head, and pain wearily, O 
spine, that I may feel myself justified in the eye 
of heaven and earth in submitting to the mortifi- 
cation of trying to compass a little rest ! " This 
is not the view entertained in Ceylon. 

No, all day long I could not but feel I was in a 
Buddhist land, — a land in which the natural ap- 
peal of climate to dreamy repose had been lifted 
by a great spiritual genius into the realm of an es- 
pecial religious faith. It was Christmas Day, but 
of this the people all around me knew nothing. 
Had they kept holiday, it would have been in 
commemoration of their own saviour, the Buddha. 
No end of angel songs over his coming into the 
world had they wherewith to celebrate his advent 
day. He was, moreover, the nearest akin to 
Jesus, in the spirit of merciful compassion, of all 
the founders of the great world religions. It was, 
indeed, no such ideal of rest as Jesus revealed, — 
rest in the everlasting arms of omnipotent Wis- 
dom, Holiness, and Love ; but it was a rest none 
the less unspeakably sweet and tranquillizing, — 
rest from the care and fret of the finite, deliverance 
from the power of the external to perturb the 
mind's serenity or to wound with heart-ache. 

Ah! the Occident and the Orient! — how pa- 
thetically do they need one another ! The Western 
mind roots so in the finite and manifold that life 
becomes to it a fitful fever ; while the Eastern so 
absorbs itself in the invisible and immutable that 



158 



CEYLON 



finite life evaporates in dream and illusion. Each 
sense is needful to temper the stress of the other ; 
each is indispensable for sanity and for inward 
peace. 

A pleasant drive's distance from Kandy lie 
the famous Peradeniya Botanical Gardens. 
They contain, as an instance, two hundred and fifty 
varieties of palms, with everything else on the same 
magnificent scale. Why make a futile attempt to 
detail at length the joy of wandering in them ? A 
description of a clump of bamboo, one hundred feet 
in height and one hundred and fifty feet in circum- 
ference, its clustered polished reed columns sur- 
mounted by a world of feathery ostrich plumes, is 
a piece of barren statistics. The sight of it is a 
marvel forever. Enough that the traveler from the 
far north is enraptured with the single sense, 
"Behold new heavens and a new earth ! " For all 
is new. Instead of the apple there comes up the 
mango-tree, and instead of the oak the rubber-tree. 
Poor, sad-hearted Lessing, weary of the monotony 
of the ever-recurring spring, one day broke out, 
44 Oh, that for once, instead of in the same eternal 
green, it would come out attired in red or orange 
or purple ! " Had he but gone to Ceylon, he would 
have found the exhilarating sensation of change he 
craved. An absolutely new flora seems to imply 
an absolutely new life in man. The caterpillar in 
his nature changes into a silkworm, the homely 
robin into a bird of paradise. Adam and Eve 
combined, and in their first fresh honeymoon in 



AN ECCLESIASTICAL INTERVIEW 159 



Eden, could not have felt more supremely happy 
than I in wandering round and pocketing poetic 
nutmegs and cloves instead of prosaic hickory-nuts 
and filberts, in chewing a twig of spicy cinnamon 
instead of a twig of ordinary sweet-birch, — ay, 
and in going up to a cinchona-tree and slicing off 
a bit of the bark, and taking my quinine au natu- 
rel, instead of seeking out a duly licensed apothe- 
cary shop and buying a dozen highly sublimated 
pills of the same extraction. The fall in Adam 
was condoned and blotted out. I was restored to 
Paradise. All controversy over the original site 
of Eden for me was ended. It was there that 
" the Lord God planted a garden, and out of the 
ground made to grow every tree that is pleasant 
to the sight and good for food." 

^ Before leaving Kandy, it seemed evidently 
the proper thing that a solemn international 
ecclesiastical interview should take place between 
the high priest of Buddhism, presiding over the 
most sacred shrine of the faith on earth, and the 
peripatetic representative of a body that thinks 
itself the most enlightened in the Athens of 
America. So, procuring an interpreter, — whose 
theological attainments, I am sorry to say, did not 
reach beyond the rule of three, and his linguistic 
not so high, — I went with my traveling compan- 
ion to the monastery; and, sending in our cards, 
we united with them the petition that we might 
have the privilege of a conference. The favor was 
at once conceded. Very likely, as Mrs. Besant 



160 



CEYLON 



had lately been in Ceylon, assuring the natives of 
the immense superiority of Buddhism over Chris- 
tianity, the high priest regarded us as equally 
hopeful subjects. 

Curious was the scene that followed. The mon- 
astery was very humble in its appointments, but 
with a dreamy atmosphere of all-day siesta about it. 
On a rather dilapidated sofa sat the high priest, en- 
wrapped in the traditional yellow of the Buddhist 
monk, his right arm and shoulder bare, and no 
apparent underclothing beneath the single sheetlike 
garment, — a style of apparel which, in the sweep 
it afforded the bare arm over the whole surface of 
the body, seemed, in a climate in which relief is 
often sought from cutaneous irritations, eminently 
conducive to tranquillity of mind. He was seventy 
years old, his skull as close-shaven as a cannon-ball, 
and was, moreover, one who had certainly attained 
the goal of Nirvana as far as teeth have any fur- 
ther power to ache. Around were gathered six or 
eight young monks, one or two of them alert and 
eager to join in the fray, as the talk proceeded. 
As my traveling companion is a veteran editor, 
our party was fully equipped with a rapid-firing 
Gatling gun for the discharge of volleys of ques- 
tions. 

The discussion of nice metaphysical distinctions 
through the medium of an interpreter so flagrantly 
ignorant as to be graveled even over such a bagatelle 
as the points of difference between the homogeneous 
and the heterogeneous, is not wont to be conducive 
either to sweetness or light. So the interview 



AN ECCLESIASTICAL INTERVIEW 161 



proved of attraction rather in the way of picture 
and atmosphere than of positive illumination. 

We began, of course, with an inquiry as to the 
high priest's view of Nirvana, whether a conscious 
or unconscious state, present or a future. He 
answered that it was too deep a question to be 
discussed in a short interview. We then passed on 
to the subject of creation and Creator. He replied : 
" The world never was created. It was not made, 
it grew," — an answer that while unimpeachable 
evolutionary orthodoxy, sounded oddly, from the 
way it was enunciated, like Topsy's in " Uncle 
Tom's Cabin," — "I warn't made : I jist growed." 
Next we asked for a succinct statement of the es- 
sential principle of Buddhism. He gave it in five 
negative prohibitions against killing, lying, steal- 
ing, and unchastity. Then we passed on to Chris- 
tianity, inquiring if he had ever read the Gospels. 
He said he had, and had found their teachings very 
contradictory, — not half so plain as Buddhism. 
I finally thought I would try him as to the extent 
to which he would follow his five principles. " Sup- 
pose a cobra should come into the room here," I 
said; " would you kill him? " " No," he replied. 
" What would you do ? " I asked. " Remove him." 
This was accompanied with a gentle motion, as 
though he had taken up a broom and was quietly 
sweeping out a bit of paper. After all, the tone of 
voice and the quiet attitude with which this was 
expressed were the one memorable thing in our 
conversation. Could we have really come to close 
quarters intellectually, no doubt the venerable man 



162 



CEYLON 



would have lost us in a labyrinth of metaphysical 
subtleties from which we could hardly have found 
our way out to the light of day. But here was 
something better. Here was the deepest thing in 
Buddhism, its sense of the one universal life, its 
feeling of compassion with the vast sentient struggle 
going on from the serpent on his belly to Buddha 
lapsed in Nirvana, its identification of self with the 
all in all. How I longed to see a cobra come 
gliding in, then coil himself and rear his terrible 
poison-fanged head for a stroke, while the yellow- 
robed old patriarch should quietly rise, and with a 
feather-duster in hand as gently " remove " him as 
that dear old English Buddhist, Uncle Toby, did 
the fly, when he opened the window for him with 
the loving word, " The world is wide enough for 
thee and for me." Not for a moment did I doubt 
that in the spell of his religion the quietistic old 
man could tenderly have done it ; whereas if either 
of us two devout Christians had undertaken the 
removal, even with a street-sweeper's broom of 
birch twigs, such enmity would have been set on 
between serpent and " seed of the woman " that 
the issue of the conflict would have been problem- 
atical to the last degree. 



INDIA 



I. 

j The voyage of thirteen hundred miles from 
Ceylon to Calcutta is pleasantly broken by 
a short stay in Pondicherry and in Madras, — some- 
times also, it is true, unpleasantly broken by fright- 
ful typhoons, cyclonic mast and funnel twisters 
that extract by their roots these mighty columns of 
wood or iron as easily as a prairie stump-puller the 
fangs of pines and oaks. But still we sailed over 
the same summer seas. 

Truly, if anywhere that saddest of thoughts, " it 
might have been," strikes home with sharp historic 
pang, it must be to the Frenchman disembarking 
at Pondicherry and looking around him at about 
all that remains of his country's once magnificent 
dream of Indian empire. There first the splendid 
genius of Desaix divined India, and flashed out 
in every detail the amazing, but entirely feasible, 
programme carried into execution by the practical 
minds of Clive, Hastings, Wellington, and Napier. 
Not Alexander starting out from Macedonia with 
a handful of disciplined Greeks to fling them on 
the millions of Asia, and to swell his forces with 
fresh armies of sepoys as he marched along, ever 
had a more prophetic eye than Desaix. As late 



164 



INDIA 



even as 1802, Napoleon, with his passion for the 
" barbaric pearls and gold " of the East and his 
fascination by the cyclonic careers of the Ghengis 
Khans and Tamerlanes of Asia, was still nursing 
the same imperial dream. 

Yet to-day in all effete and decaying Pondi- 
cherry, the most attractive thing the traveler finds 
to do is to go outside the settlement at sunrise 
to the public fountains and watch the beautiful 
young Indian women drawing the day's supply of 
water. The lithe and graceful Caryatides, each 
with her gauzy sheet of sky blue or scarlet girt 
round her waist and falling in folds to her ankles, 
the other end thrown over one shoulder and down 
the back, leaving exposed her bronzed sides and 
arms to support the shapely vase of brass poised 
on her head, — here is a life-school for the artist 
that might tempt him to many a lingering month 
of stay. Ah! sighs the enraptured gazer, why 
cannot use and beauty, work and play, thus always 
be made to harmonize ? Doubtless, with our own 
boasted advent of the scientific age of plumbing, 
enabling each gracious damsel to draw, for herself 
and by herself, her prosaic pail of water at the 
kitchen sink, there came a deal of saving in the 
way of time and strength. But alas! for the 
sunshine, laughter, and gossip that went out with 
it. Where, under such a disenchanting dispensa- 
tion, would have been the romantic idyl of Isaac 
and Rebecca, with all the wealth of poetry that 
has shed its halo around Indian, Syrian, Arabian, 
Persian maidens gathered at the public fountains 
to draw their vessels of crystal water ? 



THE HOOGLY 



165 



Our plan, on arriving in Calcutta, was to 
strike at once northward to visit the Hima- 
layas, and then return to see the city. As fit prepa- 
ration for a sight of these stupendous ranges, and to 
give the mind the requisite geologic stretch to take 
them in, commend me to a sail up the Hoogly, 
one of the mighty streams through which the hun- 
dred-mouthed Ganges pours out into the ocean its 
continental waste. " By their works ye shall know 
them." Here, then, before the eyes are the works 
of the Himalayas, of their vast storehouses of snow, 
of their enormous rainfall, of their stupendous sup- 
plies of disintegrating material. What a process of 
world-building ! — enormous islands of mud form- 
ing in a day, and forthwith under the generative 
force of the tropical heat breeding dense jungles of 
vegetation and spawning for them their broods of 
serpents and tigers. Yet, dangerous for poor little 
man to tempt his fate amid such colossal operations 
of nature. The terror of rivers is the Hoogly to the 
sailor. Nowhere else do pilots receive such pay. 
Even Caesar there would be too subdued for brag- 
gadocia, and humbly admit that no matter whether 
they carried him or the obscurest tourist, each 
would prove an equally insignificant midget in the 
face of such overwhelming forces. And the bluff 
John Bull pilot, too, would take him at the same 
lowly estimate. Experience of but a month back, 
and the pilot for to-day's run is turned into a 
superannuated Methuselah, so perpetually are shoal 
and current shifting. Touch bottom anywhere for 
a moment and so afford a pivot in the keel, and over 



166 



INDIA 



and over does the mighty tide shoulder and roll 
ship and freight, whirling them under to destruc- 
tion. Yes, here are the works of the Himalayas ! 
How one longs to stand in their overwhelming 
presence ! 

Three hundred and fifty miles due north 
from Calcutta lies Darjeeling. In the little 
mountain province of Sikkim, thrust in between 
Bhotan to the east and Nepal to the west, it af- 
fords a superb platform, some seven thousand feet 
in height, from which to survey the Himalayas. 
Dear, likewise, to the English mother's heart as a 
place of refuge for her fair-haired, blue-eyed little 
Saxon boys and girls from the slaughter of the 
innocents decreed by the feller than Herod fury 
of the sun of India ! 

For the first three hundred miles the railway 
runs across the vast dead level of northern India, 
— a plain which, on an enormously greater scale, 
bears the same relation to the Himalayas as Lom- 
bardy to the Alps. Substitute for the Po the 
Ganges and its tributaries ; for the vine and mul- 
berry, rice and jute fields, palms and bananas ; and 
for Monte Rosa, Mt. Blanc, and the Jungf rau, peaks 
like Mt. Everest and Kinchin janga, whose actual 
snow-line only starts at an elevation higher than the 
summit of Mt. Blanc, — and some slight estimate 
may be formed of the comparative geologic scale 
on which nature has wrought in the two regions. 

These first three hundred miles of the journey I 
pass over, till the station of Silliguri is reached. 



DARJEELING 



167 



From this point to Darjeeling, fifty miles away, the 
ascent of over seven thousand feet is made by a 
narrow gauge railway, in open observation cars. 
The road is a marvelous piece of engineering skill. 
Seven hours are occupied in the ascent, but nowhere 
else in the world can so much of tropical beauty 
and mountain glory be crowded into the same space 
of time. The track winds and rewinds upon itself, 
now in mile-long serpentine curves, and now in lit- 
tle loops ; but everywhere it opens views down into 
ravishing valleys and gorges, clad with the most 
luxuriant and varied vegetation of palms, bananas, 
tree ferns, thirty feet high, banyans, laurels, rho- 
dodendra, magnolias, evergreen oaks. Thus from 
zone to zone of steadily changing flora, one rises 
hour by hour. 

The exuberant jungle life of the lower half of 
the ascent beggars description. It is a struggle 
for life between vine and tree, plant and parasite, 
in which each is victor ; for all seems to triumph, 
and nothing to die, or, if it does, at once to rise 
again in new arboreal resurrection and ascension. 
To the topmost crest of the giant trees climb the 
enormous vines, mantling the trunks with their 
huge leaves, flinging out like banners their spikes or 
sprays of flowers, leaping across to seize hold of 
and overrun new giants or sending down a multitu- 
dinous rain of aerial roots to seek the earth again 
and with centripetal force begin afresh the fight of 
the strangling python vines with the mighty forest 
Laocoon. The fable of Antaeus, his strength born 
again each time he touched his mother earth — here 



168 



INDIA 



is no more a stale literary illustration. In the tro- 
pics vine and tree alike have learned this secret. 
Plants are there which begin their career fifty feet 
aloft as parasites. Then down to the earth they 
drop their aerial roots, fill vein and artery with the 
fructifying sap that steads them for an upward 
growth of limbs and crest, till, surrounded on all 
sides, the parent tree dies, rots, vanishes away, and 
the parasite alone is left, scaffolded fifty feet high 
on roots from whose original starting-point aloft 
first begins the trunk and limbs of the now victo- 
rious heir. Perforce one sees a sly vegetable innu- 
endo at certain radicals at home, so bent on a dis- 
play of roots as to dwarf any suggestion of foliage 
atop to correspond. 

Higher up, in a zone from three to five thousand 
feet in elevation, succeed the great clearings of the 
tree plantations, terraced step on step in gigantic 
flights of stairs up the flanks of the mountains ; 
though, far above them, begins again the forest 
growth, now largely consisting of evergreen oaks, 
rhododendra, and magnolias. Thus, after nearly 
six hours of the highest wrought delight, we had 
reached the point at which was to open upon us, 
and be carried with us to the end of the ride, the 
full glories of the Himalayas. So far the moun- 
tain we had been slowly climbing had lain between 
us and them, but now with a single curve all was 
to leap in sight. 

Alas ! if ever I was tempted to believe in the 
Prince of Evil and his merciless malignity, now 
was his hour of triumph. Up along the flanks of 



AGAIN MONGOLIANS 169 



our mountain came stealthily climbing the ob- 
scuring mists. Thicker and thicker they grew, till 
we were immersed in them, and all was blotted 
out. " I told you so ! I told you so ! " was now 
the mocking voice that filled the air. In pessimis- 
tic love had a dozen kindly friends in Calcutta 
prophesied to us before we left, " You will have a 
fatiguing journey, bury your heads in the clouds, 
and come back sadder, even if wiser men about the 
Himalayas." That such people should live and be 
justified in the end seemed the insoluble enigma 
of mortal life ! 

Well, we had reached Darjeeling, and had 
some hours of daylight to spare* Why care 
for snow peaks ! The proper study of mankind is 
man ! Were there not Nepalese, Bhoteans, Thibe- 
tans, in crowds to study? Were we not on the con- 
fines of mysterious Thibet, the unriddled country 
which, though it will let no man in — unless he can 
contrive to sew up his eyelids and to accumulate on 
his person solid stratifications of dirt so as to pass 
for a plausible native — still lets many of its people 
out? We had struck Mongolians again. In vain 
had we fled from the presence of the mighty yel- 
low race, — fled from it in Japan, China, the Ma- 
lay Archipelago. There were once more before us 
the flattened face, the broad cheek-bones, the nar- 
row, oblique eyes, the black stiff hair, the peculiar 
tallowy hue of this vast Asian people. Wonder 
ceases at the careers of the Attilas, the Ghengis 
Khans, the Tamerlanes, with such countless hordes 



170 



INDIA 



to draw on. So swift for the bazaar we steered, to 
see, while daylight lasted, our yellow fellow-crea- 
tures and their baffling alloys, with all the coin of 
humanity that passes current among these Hima- 
layan hill tribes. 

In the vast migrations to and fro of the human 
race, a certain strain of Tartar blood seems to have 
been poured into the veins of all these hill tribe 
peoples. Nepalese, Bhoteans, dwellers in Sikkim, 
though they have had beauty enough to drown out 
much of the Tartar ugliness, still — great numbers 
of them — suggest the suspicion that somewhere 
back there was a Tartar in the wood-pile. Crowds 
of the people, however, were pure, unadulterated 
Thibetans, ugly enough to satisfy the claims of the 
portrait the Romans drew of Attila. Tartarus ! no 
trouble longer about the origin of the word. No 
question, either, that this same great race had 
a hand in fashioning our Esquimaux and North 
American Indians. There was a railroad once 
across Behring Straits, in some earlier geologic 
epoch. 

From a religious point of view, these Thi- 
betans offer a field of study, if not spirit- 
ually elevating, still intensely interesting. His- 
torically, their own land furnishes the most ex- 
traordinary example of a pure theocracy — minus 
a God, but with no end of devils — existing in the 
world. King, priest, magistrate, tax-gatherer, 
doctor, executioner, every function is exercised by 
a lama, the generic name of priest or monk. 



THE APOTHEOSIS OF MACHINERY 171 



Strange to say, the people are all Buddhists ; and 
among them the great Indian Buddha had a sec- 
ond incarnation. Most certainly he needed it, to 
get rid of his previous conceptions ; for in his 
second incarnation he had abandoned every trace 
of inwardness, and surrendered himself, root and 
branch, to sheer externalism. Of all the heels- 
over -head travesties of the whirligig of time, 
surely Thibetan Buddhism is the oddest. Now 
first I came in contact with literal, unadulterated 
machine-praying. Long before, I had thought to 
encounter this strange phenomenon in certain 
clergymen at home ; but always, with them, the 
machine was the man himself. Here, however, 
the machine was wholly extra-human, — a small 
copper cylinder, internally filled with yards of 
rolled-up prayers, revolving on an upright handle. 
It goes with the speed of a top. Indeed, the 
devout Oxford clergyman whose standing bet it 
was that he could give any other man in England 
to Pontius Pilate and then beat him through the 
service, here would have found Othello's occupa- 
tion gone. Every revolution is the whole service, 
liturgy and Athanasian creed included ; and the 
revolutions are two hundred a minute. And yet 
these little cylinders, plentiful as rattles in babies' 
hands, were for private devotions only. In the 
temples we saw them three feet high and eighteen 
inches in diameter, capable of holding miles of 
prayers, and run by the hour by man-power. 
Water-power is often substituted where a fall can 
be secured, and is just as efficacious. In fact, 



\ 



172 INDIA 

the very winds are subsidized for devotions, as in 
Holland for windmills to grind the corn. From 
thousands of poles flutter long streamers on which 
the prayers are written, and every flutter says 
them all. In our own boasted land, we have but 
begun to grasp the higher applications of machin- 
ery. 

In previous chapters I may have seemed some- 
what unjust in my strictures on the lack of in- 
wardness and the tendency to ceremonialism of 
the whole Mongol-Malay race, from Japan in the 
north to the Malay Archipelago in the south. I 
felt it by instinct three days after I was in Japan. 
I was utterly oppressed by it in China, where 
government, manners, education, literature, are one 
great outward web of ceremony divorced from 
inward organic life. And now, in my next en- 
counter with this self-same Mongol race, I had 
found the whole thing gone to seed, — dry hay 
for succulent grass ; not so much as lip-service, 
only machine service, for the devout overflow of 
the heart. By ceremonialism I mean simply the 
divorce between expression and impression, the 
parrot-like repetition of conventional formulae sub- 
stituted for the living man. Symbolism, on the 
contrary — symbolism raised to the pitch of de- 
lirium — is the root religious vice of India ; and 
soon in Benares on the sacred Ganges shall we see 
it displayed in its most luxuriant jungle growth. 
But, of the two, the emaciated, trance-struck fakir 
is more attractive than the machine-twirling Bud- 
dhist of Thibet. 



A LAMA'S WIFE 



173 



Fain would I describe an introduction we were 
favored with to a lama and his wife. Such a 
jolly personality, she, and such a living illustration 
of the line, " Religion never was designed to make 
our pleasures less " ! On her head she wore a 
crown of red coral set with big unpolished tur- 
quoises, while her cheeks were smeared with pig's 
blood, — a rouge which certainly effects its pur- 
pose. The face loomed round as a full moon ris- 
ing red in a smoky autumn horizon; and as her 
religion entitled her spouse and herself to one 
tenth of the income of the flock, she evidently felt 
it a fitting outcome of the second incarnation of the 
Buddha in Thibet. Not yet had she experienced 
the depressing effect of what in New England is 
called the " decrease in reverence for the clergy." 
Should her husband die, a fierce contest would 
ensue among his devout followers for a hair of his 
head, a paring of his fingernails, to wear as a 
charm in an amulet, or for one or the other of his 
thigh bones to make a horn of, through which to 
blow the praises of the faith. Alas ! as I thought 
in contrast of many a sweet, patient minister's 
wife in Massachusetts, nagged by cross-grained 
parishioners I could not but exclaim, " How 
blessed thy lot, O woman ! " Not a female in her 
parish advanced enough to begrudge her her coral 
crown set with turquoises, or even so much as to 
raise the question whether she were not a trifle 
too extravagant in the use of pig's blood on her 
cheeks ! 



174 



INDIA 



The clouds and mist that had prevailed on 
our arrival in Darjeeling continued on 
through the afternoon and evening, and we went 
to bed sadly impressed with the fickle and moody 
temper of mountain ranges. Orders were left, 
however, that should the sky be clear we should 
be called half an hour before sunrise. Half an 
hour before sunrise there came a tap at our door 
on the ground floor of the hotel, and we knew the 
day was saved. Swift was our response ; for it 
was the Himalayas calling us, and not Ameer, our 
servant. So, jumping at once into warm clothing 
and each swallowing a hot cup of tea (always in 
India brought to one's bedside on awakening), we 
stepped out on the broad terrace in front of the 
hotel. 

The terrace stood on the steep flank of a 
mountain higher than the top of Mt. Washington, 
the mountain itself dipping down into a pro- 
found valley beneath, but one abyss in a billowy 
ocean of like mountains. All below was in im- 
penetrable darkness, through which no distinct 
object could be made out ; but over across the 
abyss, and seemingly floating on the upper sky, 
stood — hung rather — the snow-white peaks of 
Kinchinjanga (next to Everest the highest moun- 
tain in the world), dominating the colossal group 
of five called The Treasuries of the Snow. The 
white at first was of an almost spectral sheen, 
lucent, yet etherealized ; and the elevation at 
which, perfectly defined, it hung above the vast 
lower darkness filled the mind with a sense of awe 



THE HIMALAYAS 



175 



as before a spectacle wholly detached from the 
earth. Then the summit of Kinchinjanga began 
to flush with rosy light, the flush gradually de- 
scending till it touched the tops of all five sister 
peaks. And now ensued the beatific vision of 
God's glory. To right and left, over a circle of 
nearly ninety degrees, peak after peak began to 
flame, the lowest at an altitude of over twenty 
thousand feet, while still the darkness lingered on 
in the whole nether world. Often as the compari- 
son has been made between the great discover- 
ers, poets, and prophets of the ages — the New- 
tons, Dantes, Isaiahs — and the supreme mountain 
peaks heralding the advent of the sun while yet 
the rest of the world is wrapped in darkness, never 
before did I so feel its solemnity. How long, how 
long, did these mighty monarchs keep solely to 
themselves their light and glow, or but sympathet- 
ically share it with one another's kindred spirits, 
before the broadening illumination spread over the 
foothills and penetrated down into the valleys ! 
But at last it reached them, dyeing in rich maroon 
the vast rolling sea of the inferior intervening 
mountains. When it is recalled that Kinchinjanga 
is over twenty-eight thousand feet high, and the 
group it dominates twenty-five thousand, it readily 
can be conceived that nowhere else on the globe 
can this sublime phenomenon so impress the im- 
agination. In the presence of so grand a specta- 
cle, time loses its petty finite measures ; minutes 
assume the character of slow-moving secular dura- 
tions. One holds his breath in awe at the sense of 



176 



INDIA 



how long before the earth beneath has broken its 
sleep of night, these glorious heralds of the day 
have seen and greeted with their jubilees the far- 
away rising of the sun. 

VII ^ e cou ^ no * ^ n S er > however, too long on 
the terrace, for, to profit to the fullest by 
the early hours of the morning, we were to ascend 
fifteen hundred feet higher to the top of Tiger 
Hill, from which Mt. Everest would be opened up. 
Chairs were waiting for us, each with six Thi- 
betan coolies, four for constant service and two 
for reliefs. Soon we were on their shoulders, 
moving at a swift and steady pace. Admirable 
mountaineers, accustomed to carry heavy burdens 
over the Himalayan passes, the lowest of them at 
an elevation of fifteen thousand feet, they made 
light work of us. Of all the luxurious methods 
of steadily surmounting heights and at the same 
time drinking in the prospect, commend me to the 
chair on the shoulders of four sure-footed carriers. 
The mind is disengaged and free. No more al- 
ternation between longing to abandon one's self 
to the glory of the transcendent scenery and the 
fear of spraining an ankle or breaking one's 
neck. 

The path wound along the flank of Tiger Hill, 
through woods of magnolias, laurels, rhododendra, 
and evergreen oaks, with constant vistas of the 
whole Himalayan range. Arrived at Senchal, the 
abandoned site of an old military cantonment, Mt. 
Everest had already loomed up in the far distance, 



THE HIMALAYAS 



177 



while at the summit of Tiger Hill we enjoyed the 
delight of distinctly making out all three peaks of 
this highest mountain on the globe. Twenty-nine 
thousand and two feet ! For round numbers the 
two might have been spared, but who would belittle 
such an altitude by subtracting an inch ? The 
three clustered peaks were over a hundred miles 
away, though so clear was the atmosphere that they 
stood out in perfect distinctness. Anyhow, we 
had seen Mt. Everest, and so in all after life could 
use it as an all-round-the-world club to beat down 
the pride of any who should presume to boast of 
Mt. Blanc in our majestic presence. 

None the less, the real glory of the scene lay in 
the stupendous Kinchinjanga group. It, too, was 
forty-five miles away, though it seemed but ten. 
Indeed, on first getting into the presence of the 
Himalayas, one has to go through a fairly revolu- 
tionary mental process in grasping the proportions 
of things. A mountain, in the foreground, twice 
the height of Mt. Washington, is only an insig- 
nificant foothill. It has still three thousand feet 
to grow before reaching the level of the snow-line, 
and then, to become a peer of the great ones, 
would have to add from nine to thirteen thousand 
feet of snow. Mountains, in sight, over twenty- 
two thousand feet in height are thick as trees in 
the woods. Thus, for an ordinary mortal, it is no 
small feat to evolve a mind to match the moun- 
tains. Notwithstanding the educational advan- 
tages we started with, it took my friend and me 
fully twenty-four hours to do it. 



178 



INDIA 



j Comparisons, it is said, are odious. That 
depends. If the object of the comparison 
be light, and not heat, it is often a very helpful 
thing. Therefore, in comparing, for example, the 
Alps with the Himalayas, one would have to admit 
freely that the Alps, with their emerald green up- 
land pastures contrasted with their snow-crowned 
domes and peaks, are far more beautiful. This 
grows partly from the fact that they are so much 
more easily manageable by mind and imagination, 
and do not so tensely stretch the mental tether. 
The Himalayas, so to speak, make an immense de- 
mand on the intellectual as well as the aesthetic 
imagination. 

To grasp any adequate idea of their magnitude, 
the mind must expand to the conception that they 
are in reality two colossal ranges, the one fifty miles 
behind the other, and that in the continental abysses 
of the valleys between them are gathered the wa- 
ters of the mighty Indus and the Brahmapootra, 
the first flowing round by their western flanks and 
the second by their eastern, to enter India, while 
all along down their southern slopes stream the 
thousand affluents of the Ganges. Then, to com- 
plete the picture, imagination must evoke the lim- 
itless expanse of the vast South Pacific Ocean, 
the feeder of the ever-renewed treasuries of their 
snows. For the six months of summer, the steadily 
blowing southeast monsoon conveys the enormous 
evaporation of such an ocean under the full blaze 
of a tropical sun, — an evaporation pouring down 
in deluges of rain on the plains, and falling in per- 



THE ALPS AND THE HIMALAYAS 179 



petual snow as it strikes the frozen elevations of 
the mountains. Easily, then, will it be seen in 
contrast that, to form an adequate conception of 
the Alps, alike of their beauty and their structure, 
no such immense demand is made on the powers. 
Further, among the Alps the eye takes in at a 
single glance an infinity of beautiful detail. It 
revels in the emerald sheen of the velvety upland 
pastures, and is transported with the amethystine 
blue of the glacial ice. It follows with charm the 
exquisite outlines of the snow-crowned Jungfrau 
and Silberhorn, or commands, far below, the poetic 
beauty of the Lauterbrunnen valley. No such 
thing as this is possible among the Himalayas. It 
would demand a telescopic eye. 

Further back, I spoke of the necessity of evolv- 
ing a mind to match the mountains. This holds 
true whether the mountains be Alps or Himalayas. 
And yet, to achieve a consummation so devoutly to 
be wished, I know of no so feasible way as to sup- 
ply a Raphael or Mozart to voice the gracious 
beauty of the Alps, a Michelangelo or Beethoven 
to interpret the overpowering sublimity of the 
Himalayas. And yet, as the whole day long the 
same crystal purity of the atmosphere continued to 
prevail, and as on the following morning the same 
miracle of a sunrise was repeated, we could not 
but feel that two humble mortals at least had 
added many a cubit to their aesthetic and geologic 
stature. A stupendous sensation, constituting a 
veritable epoch in our lives, had we enjoyed. 



II. 



j Calcutta, the English part of it, is a bril- 
liant European capital, with immensely pic- 
turesque Asiatic adjuncts. Its enormous parks and 
stately avenues for riding and driving at once call 
to mind London, yet suggest a striking tropical 
contrast. Instead of elms and oaks, the trees are 
palms, banyans, bho-trees, tamarinds ; and instead 
of red-faced, plush-clad John Bull coachmen and 
footmen, the drivers of the handsome private car- 
riages are dark-skinned Hindus, in dress a splendid 
conflagration of scarlet and gold, before which even 
the flaming poinsettias and bourgainvillia vines 
pale their ineffectual fires. How infinitely becom- 
ing a scarlet and gold turban to a finely chiseled, 
well-nigh black face ! Indeed, the English ladies 
and gentlemen within the carriages would hardly 
subject themselves to such a contrast if they knew 
it to be so aesthetically damaging. How anaemic 
and bleached out they look, as though they had 
grown in cellars ! And yet how assuredly they look 
the real lords and masters ! At a glance is read 
their superior force of body and mind, their cour- 
age, imperial might of will. A lion among a herd 
of timid deer could not more emphasize the fact. 
Clive's victory at Plassey, — it is here explained in 
a flash. Then look out to the right or left across 



CALCUTTA 



181 



the park. Here a game of cricket is going on, 
here one of golf, here one of polo. The English- 
man is keeping up his muscle. Inevitably, comes 
to mind Wellington's saying that Waterloo was 
won on the foot-ball field at Eton. 

Yes, one is in Bengal. The streets swarm with 
the motley colored population. Ten men dart to 
pick up your handkerchief, should you chance to 
drop it ; a dozen to open the carriage door, should 
you chance to stop. Meanwhile, fifty are elbowing 
one another to sell you something. Five are sure 
you want a barber ; ten, you want a pen-knife ; all 
the rest, that you want photographs, flowers, a hand- 
mirror, a pair of embroidered slippers, a model of 
a temple, a scarf-pin. From the swarms that unite 
their frantic efforts to heave up the steps of the 
hotel your traveling bag, — in weight, perhaps, six 
pounds, — and then individually apply for a money 
recognition of their exhausting toil, you would 
think yourself present at the transportation of a 
colossal Egyptian sphinx from the quarries of the 
Lower Cataract to far-away Memphis. Up to your 
very bedroom they stream, each salaaming as before 
a Mogul emperor. What exuberant tropical imag- 
inations, in the glamour of which the naked fact 
that they actually got within six feet of the hand- 
bag is glorified into an eternal obligation of reward ! 
You wax angry, and order them out of the room. 
Still more profound the obeisances. At last the 
Tamerlane begins to rise within you, as you snatch 
a trunk-strap and feel like lashing the " pampered 
jades of Asia." Finally, you effect a deliverance, 



182 



INDIA 



and slam the door in their faces. With what beau- 
tiful Oriental patience do they wait outside ! Time 
is an illusion of the senses which has no objective 
existence to the Indian mind. Are we not ever 
sunk in the immutable and eternal ? You emerge 
from the apartment, and there they are ! Now, for 
the first time, you get to the bottom of the Parable 
of the Unjust Judge, who feared not God, neither 
regarded man, but had to give in none the less to 
the persistent clamor of the widow. Had he been 
the whole Supreme Court of the United States, 
Chief Justice Marshal included, you would not 
have the heart to blame him. 

I dwell on incidents like these because from 
the outset they are needful for any vivid 
interpretation of India. Human life here is ant- 
cheap, if not dirt-cheap. Go into the dining-room 
of the hotel — each guest has his private servant 
behind his chair. Walk through the passage-ways 
of the hotel after bedtime — a servant is sleeping 
on a mat before each door. A clap of the hands 
inside, and in a second he is on his feet. Self-help 
soon ceases to be so much as a reminiscence. Here 
am I, a man who, in democratic America, has been 
wont to tend his own furnace, and in all grave do- 
mestic crises to stand ready to act as second girl ; 
but in India it is a struggle to be allowed to tie my 
own shoestrings or brush my own teeth. A knock 
at the door in the morning, and tea and toast are 
brought to my bedside, the bath is pronounced 
ready, and with difficulty, after falling back upon 



HINDU TRAITS 183 

the Declaration of Independence and proclaiming 
that all men are born free and equal to handling a 
towel, am I then permitted to dry my own skin. 
I ^ni getting demoralized. India is steadily under- 
mining my manhood, emasculating my will, as she 
did with the early Aryans, the Moguls, the Afghans. 
Soon I shall not so much as know the meaning of 
a shoe-brush, a furnace, a second girl. Sunk in ef- 
feminacy, I shall hand over all the affairs of state 
to my slaves and eunuchs. Then a fresh irruption 
will break in from the barbarous, hardy north ; and 
a new Afghan or Mogul dynasty will be founded 
on my ruins. Thus, in the disintegrating effect 
wrought on one's own personality does a man soon 
get all the needful historical data for the interpre- 
tation of the century-long story of India. A week's 
experience of such demoralization is more edifying 
than reading whole volumes of history. One be- 
comes history. De te fabula narratur. 



With such a teeming population as that of 
Bengal, millions of families of six living on 
a wage of fifty cents a week, utter subserviency of 
body and mind, evincing itself in abject prostration 
before man and the gods, is what must be looked 
for. The way to favor with the strong has always 
been groveling in the dust before them, and the 
strong on earth and the strong in heaven are one and 
the same to the Hindu mind. Hence the rankest 
jungle growth of superstitions ; hence religious rites 
among the lower orders so hideously obscene that 
one could hardly fathom how they could have origi- 



184 



INDIA 



nated but by recalling how hideously obscene were 
the lives of the earthly rulers these poor grovelers 
worshiped as their sole ideals of might and glory. 
The painted brothels of Pompeii are shrines of 
purity alongside the orgies of lust portrayed in the 
carvings of many a Hindu temple. The apotheosis 
of a beast, animal or human, — of a cobra, a 
jackal, a foul and bloodthirsty tyrant, — one per- 
fectly comprehends it now. And yet among the 
higher classes of the Indians are encountered men 
of the loftiest and purest theistic faith, men at once 
of the rarest munificence of charitable action and 
of the devoutest spirit of contemplation. And the 
range of such characters is constantly growing, 
as familiarity with Western thought and organized 
charity spreads more widely, and supplements the 
overpowering tendency of the Indian mind to ab- 
straction from all terrestrial interests. 

How overpowering this tendency still remains is 
even to-day attested in acts that strike the Occiden- 
tal mind with wonder. In Calcutta, in any of the 
great cities of India, it is no unusual incident to 
see a man who has made himself a millionaire be- 
coming by the age of fifty so utterly world-weary, 
so tired with all the fret of the finite, as to throw 
up business, make over his property to his children, 
and himself wander forth naked but for a loin- 
cloth, a staff in his hand, and a beggar's bowl at 
his girdle, to spend the rest of his days in the for- 
est in the contemplation of the infinite. Think, in 
contrast, of the consternation on Wall Street, had 
it suddenly been announced in the "Herald" or 



HINDU TRAITS 



185 



"Tribune " that Jay Gould, weary of the long fret 
of the finite involved in wrecking railroads, had 
thrown up his millions and started out, a naked 
mendicant, to devote what remained of his life to 
absorption in the Absolute. Bloomingdale Asylum ! 
would have been the exclamation on every lip. 
And yet, in any higher sense of the word, which of 
the two were the saner seems hardly open to ques- 
tion, — certainly it would not be in India. 



III. 



j Our first objective point on leaving Cal- 
cutta was Benares, on the banks of the sacred 
Ganges. It lies some four hundred and fifty miles 
away, in a northwesterly direction, the holiest city 
in India to the Hindus, as formerly to the Buddhists. 
Hither, five centuries and more before the Christian 
era, came Sakya Muni, after receiving his illumi- 
nation under the bho-tree in Gaya, to preach the 
new faith in the very J erusalem of Brahmanism. 
Buddhism passed away long centuries ago, and not 
a shrine remains in the city as a relic of its former 
power. But still Benares keeps on the Mecca of 
the Hindus. In vain the Moslems destroyed it in 
1194, razing to the ground one thousand temples 
and building mosques in their place. The faith 
or superstition of the people proved too strong. 
For Benares was the city of the sacred Ganges, the 
threefold divine river that runs through heaven, 
hell, and earth. To die on its banks, to have one's 
ashes cast upon its waters, was the highway to the 
realms of peace. A thousand miles, barefoot, hun- 
gry, and sleeping by the roadside, will the poorest 
peasants travel to bathe in its flood and drink its 
water. Troops of them — men, women, and chil- 
dren — one constantly meets, journeying toward the 
holy city, or returning home with vessels filled at 



\ 



BENARES 187 

its sacred stream. To it are the feeble and dying 
carried, that they may pass away on its banks ; and 
even, if too far inland for the journey, a portion of 
the body is sent to be burned to ashes and thrown 
on its swelling flood. 

As a result of this faith, innumerable temples 
stretch for miles along the river side. From the 
elevation on which they stand descend superb 
flights of stone steps, called ghats, hundreds of feet 
broad and fifty feet in length, to the river brink. 
Along with the temples are solid palaces, con- 
structed by princes of the different provinces, in 
which they or the members of their households may 
await the hour of death, while multitudes of poorer 
people lie tossing under the blazing sun till their 
lingering diseases quit their hold and the supreme 
hour of life's privilege arrives. 

Strange, indeed, is the spectacle, as one 
elbows and squeezes his way through the 
narrow, crowded streets among the temples. The 
countless pilgrims, arrayed in their holiday attire, 
light up the scene with the tropical splendor of a 
flower garden. As each temple is an infallible cure 
for some specific disease, or of atonement for some 
form of ceremonial sin, a regular round of visitation 
is prescribed ; and, besides, the greedy Brahman 
priests in each must get their share of the spoils. 
What a sight to watch the crowds around the holy 
well, gulping down great draughts of the nasty, 
sacred liquid ! As immense masses of flowers are 
thrown in as votive offerings, to ferment and rot 



188 



INDIA 



there, the water has the consistency and smell of 
a thick, fetid vegetable soup. Chemically analyzed, 
the formula would be one third dysentery, one 
third diphtheria, and one third cholera, with a trace 
of water. Indeed, could certain holy wells like this 
and the one at Mecca be put in charge of a duly 
qualified Sanitary Deity, in the opinion of physi- 
cians the scourge of cholera might be stamped out. 
And yet, to the entranced devotees, the nectar of 
the gods could not furnish a more delicious draught. 
Such a triumph of faith over eye and nose could 
hardly be credited till seen in practical operation. 

Meanwhile the gay-colored crowds are swarming 
through the narrow streets. Slow is one's pro- 
gress at best, but the struggle is rendered tenfold 
harder by the large number of sacred cows that are 
meandering round at their own sweet will. Like 
all unduly privileged religious beings, — whether 
popes, grand lamas, fakirs, or venerated monkeys, 
— these cows take on insufferable airs of pre- 
scriptive sanctity. Ordinary human piety and 
humility are as nothing in their supernal sight. 
Now, undulating sideways and on the full trot, 
comes one of them, straight down the narrow, 
densely packed street. Eight and left fall back 
the pilgrims, pressing into open doorways, jammed 
against walls, or knocked down and run over, as 
may be. Anyhow, the cow gets through, which is all 
she cares for. Then, a second sacred cow is seized, 
this time with a contemplative fit. Evidently, she 
is mastered by an impulse to meditate the Abso- 
lute, as straight across the narrow street, seven 



THE GHATS 



189 



feet wide, she plants herself, — a sacred dam, heap- 
ing up the great human current. How the pro- 
fane mind yearns to twist her holy tail ! But 
to do so would mean to get one's own neck in- 
continently twisted. There is but one course, — 
patiently to wait till her mood of contemplative 
abstraction is over, — unless, perhaps, some devotee 
can divert her mind to earthly considerations by 
tempting her with a sacred cake from a temple, 
and so luring her round lengthwise to the street. 

^ An hour or two at a time of this seething 
caldron of humanity is as much as any 
ordinary mortal, however interested in his species, 
can endure. So, working his way out of the press, 
he at last reaches the river-bank, and hires a boat. 
Ah ! the relief to enjoy free elbow room and drink 
in a fresh breath of dehumanized air ! It is a mar- 
velous spectacle now before the eyes, as one rows 
along the ghats. For miles stretch the profusely 
carved towers of the temples and the lines of solid 
structures in which the richer pilgrims await the 
glad summons of death. Here and there are 
massive piles of ruins, attesting the power of the 
Ganges floods to undermine and topple down the 
heaviest masonry. Though marvelously picturesque 
from a distance, seen close to all wears a dilapidated 
look, with the exception of the superb stairways of 
the ghats themselves. On these are gathered thou- 
sands on thousands of devotees in holiday attire, — 
a splendor of color in the brilliant sunshine such as 
it is rarely given a mortal to see. Down to the 



190 



INDIA 



river-bank they stream, throwing over themselves 
ample white, sheet-like coverings, from under which 
they slip off their gayer clothes. Then they wade 
into the heavenly polluted stream. How they 
plunge under the surface again and again ! How 
they drink great double handfuls of the nauseous 
water, thick with the ashes of the funeral pyres ! 
Too much of it outside and inside, they cannot 
absorb. Then, with what radiant faces do they 
emerge from the holy flood, — tottering old women, 
happy husbands and wives, laughing children ! 
They will talk of this hour to their dying day, in 
villages a thousand miles away. 

^ Meanwhile, on great bare spaces between 
the ghats, is going on the perpetual burn- 
ing of the dead, the real euthanasia of the favored 
of Krishna. At the sides stand enormous piles 
of wood, while into the open spaces between them 
are borne, on bamboo poles and wrapped in 
sheets, the bodies to be burned. For a while, for 
full baptism, the body is left immersed in the 
river, while the relatives are driving a cruel bar- 
gain with the sacerdotal wood-sellers and the 
especial sanctified wretch who has a monopoly of 
the sacred fire. Some have died rich enough to 
afford a cord of wood for the pyre, some a half- 
cord, some only a quarter. No matter. To all 
alike it means floating down the earthly river to 
where it joins the heavenly. The bargain struck, 
the wood is built up into a pyre, the body laid on 
it, more wood heaped on top, bits of sandal-wood 



BURNING THE DEAD 191 



thrown on for perfume, oil poured upon the whole, 
the sacred fire applied, and up leap the flames into 
the air. All around, like so many crows, perch 
on walls and pediments the troops of mourners ; 
and, while their special pyre is burning, the ashes 
of a dozen extinct ones near it are being raked 
down by busy hands into the sacred flood. It is 
a ghastly sight. But all along the ghats below 
are thousands of ecstatic men, women, and chil- 
dren laving in the stream and drinking its divine 
waters. Here truly is witnessed India's tropical, 
jungle growth of religious imagination raised to 
its highest pitch. 

On one pure outsider such w 7 as the impression 
left by the sights and scenes of holy Benares. 
But what can an outsider know of what was go- 
ing on in the minds of these countless pilgrims? 
They did not see the filthy Ganges I saw. They 
saw a shining crystal stream flowing on to the land 
of Beulah. They did not shudder as I did at the 
cruel devouring flames. They sang, " Agni greets 
Agni ! " our " Fire ascending seeks the sun ! " 
Some inkling of this even I got. Not wholly 
ghastly, but partly solemnizing was the scene. 
As I floated along the current of the mighty 
symbolic river and looked off at the stupendous 
spectacle, in constant refrain came sounding 
through my mind the solemn imagery of the 
hymn, — 

" One army of the living 1 God, 
To his command we bow. 
Part of the host have crossed the flood, 
And part are crossing now." 



192 



INDIA 



^ One harrowing sight, however, we did not 
witness, nor does any man in these days, 
since it has been put down with an iron hand by 
the British government. I refer to Sati, or the 
self-immolation of the widow on the funeral pyre 
of her husband, an act of self-sacrifice so rooted 
in the admiration of the Hindu world that for a 
century government dared not face the wrath any 
attempt at its suppression would be sure to evoke. 
That there could have been any sublime and heroic 
side to such a ghastly superstition, few Occidental 
minds can conceive. So, as an illustration of the 
difference between the outside and the inside view 
of any venerated custom, I quote from the pages 
of a thoroughly emancipated Hindu writer a rem- 
iniscence of his own childhood days. Readers fa- 
miliar with the Alcestis of Euripides will admit 
that the humble prose of the Hindu writer fairly 
matches, in the scene it calls up, the pathetic 
beauty of the Greek tragedian. It is, at any rate, 
a comfort to find a fresh illustration of the adage 
that there is a soul of goodness in things evil. 

" When I was a little boy," says the Hindu 
writer, " my attention was one morning roused by 
hearing from my mother that my aunt was 6 going 
on a Sati.' I pondered in my mind what the word 
4 Sati ' could mean. Being unable to solve the 
problem, I asked my mother for an explanation. 
She, with tears in her eyes, told me that my aunt 
was 6 going to eat fire.' . . . 

" I ran down to my aunt's room ; and what 
should I see there but a group of sombre-complex- 



WIDOW-BURNING 



193 



ioned women, with my aunt in the middle. . . . 
She was evidently rapt in an ecstasy of devotion, 
earnest in all she did, quite calm and composed, as 
if nothing important was to happen. It appeared 
to me that all the women assembled were admiring 
the virtue and fortitude of my aunt, while not a 
few, falling at her feet, expressed a fond hope 
that they might possess a small particle of her 
virtue. Amidst all these surroundings, what sur- 
prised me most was my aunt's stretching out one of 
her hands and holding a finger right over the wick 
of the burning lamp for a few seconds, until it was 
scorched and forcibly withdrawn by the old lady 
who bade her do so, in order to test the firmness 
of her mind. The perfect composure with which 
she underwent this fiery ordeal convinced all that 
she was a real Sati, fit to abide with her husband 
in Boykinta, — paradise. . . . 

"The body was laid on a charpoy. My aunt 
followed it, not in a closed, but in an open palhi. 
She was unveiled; and regardless of the conse- 
quences of a public exposure, she was, in a man- 
ner, dead to the external world. In truth, she 
was evidently longing for the hour when her spirit 
and that of her husband should meet together and 
dwell in heaven. 

" The dead body being placed on the pyre, my 
aunt was desired to walk seven times round it, 
which she did, while strewing flowers, cowries, 
and parched rice on the ground. . . . The Daro- 
gah stepped forward once more, and endeavored 
even at the last moment to deter her from her 



194 



INDIA 



fatal determination. But she, at the very thresh- 
old of ghastly death, the fatal torch of Yama be- 
fore her, calmly ascended the funeral pile, and, 
lying down by the side of her husband, with one 
hand under his head and another on his breast, 
was heard to call in a half-suppressed voice, 6 Hari ! 
Hari ! ' (Krishna ! Krishna !), — a sign of her firm 
belief in the reality of eternal beatitude. . . . A j 
great shout of exultation then arose from the sur- 
rounding spectators, till both the dead and living 
bodies were converted into a handful of dust and 
ashes." 

In submitting this heroic and pathetic story and 
simply leaving it to make its own impression, I can 
only humbly trust I shall not be subjected to the 
suspicion of being in secret a perfidious advocate 
of Sati, or Hindu widow-burning. 



IV. 



j Oue first stopping-places after leaving Ben- 
ares were Lucknow and Cawnpore, — Luck- 
now the scene of the heroic defense of the Re- 
gency under Lawrence and Havelock; Cawnpore 
that of the revolting brutalities exercised on the ill- 
fated men and women who, under General Wheeler, 
surrendered themselves to the tiger mercies of 
Nana Sahib. As the terrible ordeal of the Indian 
mutiny of 1857 brought out the indomitable quali- 
ties of British character even more signally than 
the original conquest, we naturally desired to see 
some of the memorable spots where these qualities 
had been illustrated at their highest pitch. In 
reality, the reconquest of India meant quite an- 
other thing from the conquest ; for now it was a 
fight, not with cowardly and undisciplined natives, 
a host of whom would run in panic from a cor- 
poral's guard, but with Sepoys thoroughly trained 
in modern tactics, armed with the best weapons, 
inspired with fanatic, racial, and religious hate, 
and who had seized upon the great depositories of 
treasure, artillery, shot, and shell, and of cavalry 
and infantry equipment. No prairie fire, started 
at a hundred centres, and suddenly converging in 
a universal sheet of flame, could have surpassed in 
speed and fury this terrific outbreak. 



196 



INDIA 



Lucknow, a city of over a quarter of a million 
inhabitants, was the luxurious capital of the kings 
of Oude till the last of them was deposed by the 
British and sent to Calcutta to linger out life on 
a pension of fifty thousand dollars a month and 
three hundred dancing-girls. Now, for the first 
time, one finds himself on strictly Mohammedan 
soil. The mosque with its slender minarets, onion- 
shaped domes, and severer Saracenic forms has 
mainly superseded the fantastic, nightmare delir- 
ium of the Hindu temple. Further, as the later 
kings of Oude were consumed by a regal passion 
for dancing that outdid Nero in his for acting and 
Commodus in his for gladiatorial fighting, highly 
interesting is it to inspect his palace, with its for- 
mer endless zenana quarters for bewitching Nautch 
girls and mirrored halls for them to dance in, — 
the king himself ever graciously pleased to en- 
courage their modest efforts with saltatory accom- 
paniments of his own august heels; historically 
instructive, too, as showing how, just as the ex- 
treme of fondness for this graceful pastime kindled 
fires in the blood that enabled the daughter of 
Herodias to dance off John the Baptist's head, so, 
with their witcheries, these Nautch girls danced off 
the head of the last king of Oude, as grown too 
vertiginous with savagery and lust to be longer fit 
for affairs of state ! Thus a lascivious art which, 
with us, has been reduced to a pale and bloodless 
abstraction is in the East so very concrete as to 
explain much history, political and religious. 



LUC KNOW 



197 



It is one thing to read about the defense 
of the Regency of Lucknow, even under 
the inspiration of Tennyson's heroic poem ; but it 
is quite another to be on the spot, and see the 
shattered ruins that testify to the literal hell-fire 
to which the short-handed garrison and crowd of 
helpless women were for five long months exposed. 
The Regency had formerly been an outlying pal- 
ace of the king of Oude, with numerous groups 
of buildings for zenanas, barracks, festival halls, 
and the other appointments of an Indian court. 
Around all these, inclosing the great gardens, ran 
a ten-foot stone wall. But close up to this wall 
pressed on two sides the solidly built houses of the 
city, while on the other sides were eminences and 
fortress-like mosques, from which was completed 
the circle of flame. Night and day, without inter- 
mission, the roar and havoc went on. 

Before being in Lucknow, I was familiar with 
the picture left by a town shattered by an earth- 
quake ; but it presented no such scene of destruc- 
tion as this Regency. The buildings were simply 
riddled with shot and shell, and pitted as if with 
small-pox from the rain of rifle-balls. At any 
time the garrison of men could have cut their way 
out ; but, alas, there were the women ! Too well 
was understood the fate that awaited them should 
they fall into the hands of the Sepoys. And so 
for five long months, under the blaze of the sum- 
mer sun of India, decimated with dysentery and 
cholera, devoured by swarms of flies, drinking hot 
and putrid water, their wounds refusing to heal, — 



198 



INDIA 



the women as heroic as the men, — the sublime 
defense went on. The way in which Tennyson 
weaves into his poem all these sickening details 
furnishes a striking illustration of the marvelous 
sense-perception of a poet's eye. A prosaic mind 
would no doubt have omitted the plague of flies as 
too undignified to allude to in company with burst- 
ing shells and exploding mines. In reality, this 
plague of flies was more terrible than shells and 
mines. They swarmed down upon the sick, the 
wounded, and the well, as though already carrion. 
The air and the ground were black with them, and 
it was a perpetual fight not to be eaten up alive. 

And yet this scene of destruction, with its awful 
memories, was no mere tragic or pathetic sight. 
How could it be on such a resplendent day, when, 
as with the sun shining on the evil and on the 
good and the rain descending on the just and on the 
unjust, the exuberance of tropical nature was mak- 
ing haste to cover havoc and ruin in such robes 
of green and scarlet and gold that death seemed 
swallowed up in victory. Every memory, too, was 
bracing to the spirit. Had we met under ordinary 
circumstances the men and women who faced this 
stern ordeal, how tiresome and commonplace would 
the majority of them have seemed ! What dreary 
garrison gossip should we have had to listen to, 
what reiteration of the grumblings that constitute 
the main wellspring of happiness to the British 
mind ! what vulgar liberties taken with the letter 
" h " ! But, when the crisis came, how magnifi- 
cently all flamed out in valor, self-sacrifice, absolute 



CAWNPORE 



199 



devotion to one another, in the angelic care of the 
wounded and cholera-smitten, and in an heroic for- 
titude no stress of misery could break. Bracing, 
indeed, such witness that underneath our common- 
place, of the earth earthy, humanity there lie such 
possibilities. It helps every one to hope of his own 
poor self, " Perhaps, after all, at the root of me I 
am not such a pitiful whipster as on the surface ! " 
Deeply one feels this as he stands in the great 
vaulted cellar in which the women were shut up for 
protection, and thinks of them, crowded in there, 
and, after high Roman fashion, searchingly debat- 
ing whether, if the worst came to the worst, they 
would be justified in killing themselves to save their 
purity, or as Christians should endure to the end 
every horror permitted by the inscrutable will of 
God ! 

To be fair, brave, too, were the Sepoys, worthy of 
all praise for their desperate valor. But here was 
a fight of civilized reason with blind fanaticism, of 
stable order with weltering chaos ; above all a fight 
of chivalrous men for helpless women against a 
swarm of wretches, rather than fall into whose pol- 
luting hands they would have chosen the tender 
mercies of tigers. Cawnpore was soon to show the 
world from what fate these women were saved. 

^ In Cawnpore, however, the scenes could 
call out no sentiments but those of pity 
or wrath. The flimsy, wretched intrenchment of 
earth which the "worst rider on the worst horse 
could have jumped over," into which were crowded 



200 



INDIA 



the soldiers, women, and children ; the imbecility 
of their general, brave and devoted, but too old for 
decisive action ; the one well from which at night 
— women and children continually shot down in 
the service — they could draw their scant supply 
of water in such torrid heat ; the other well just be- 
yond the intrenchment, into which after dark, and 
equally under fire, they stealthily flung their mul- 
tiplying dead, — all this presented the conditions 
of a slaughter-pen too horrible to revive in imagina- 
tion. Then, after twenty-three days, followed the 
surrender, on the written pledge from Nana Sahib 
of a safe passage down the Ganges to Allahabad. 
It was written, not with a human hand, but with a 
tiger's claw. 

A couple of miles away on the river side lies the 
ghat, or broad flight of stone steps descending to 
the Ganges, to which the wretched victims were 
marched. At first all seemed to show that Nana 
Sahib was faithful to his pledge. The boats were 
on hand, and into a number of them were loaded 
the prisoners, and one after another started down 
the river. Soon, however, it was noticed that only 
the older women were allowed to embark, while the 
younger were kept back. " We are betrayed ! " 
groaned General Wheeler ; and his head sunk on 
his breast. Forthwith, at a given signal, a blaze of 
fire burst forth on the ghat, and from the trees on 
the river-bank along which the boats were passing. 
The native boatmen had already jumped into the 
river, and were swimming ashore. In an instant 
General Wheeler and his staff were shot dead; 



CA WNPOEE 



201 



while the merciless fire from the bank poured in 
upon the poor men and women that had embarked, 
and set the boats in flames. 

To more than hint at the fate, for the next twenty 
days, of the younger women, then marched back, 
would be too revolting. Stories are told on the 
spot which will never get into any of the public 
histories. Even the avenger, in the shape of Gen- 
eral Havelock and his little army, came too late for 
them ; for, on the first defeat of his forces, Nana 
Sahib ordered in the town butchers with their 
knives to slaughter the wretched women and their 
children, who were then, dying and dead, thrown 
into an adjoining well. Two hours later Havelock 
and his army were on the spot. Ah, Christian 
hero and so-called Christian soldiers, in the jungle 
of your hearts lurks the bloodthirsty tiger as in the 
Indian jungle ! Vanished from sight the last faint 
glimpse of the compassionate one on the cross with 
his " Father forgive, they know not what they do ! " 
All hell broke loose in the hearts of the cursing, 
hysterically weeping soldiers, and yet this hell 
seeming a flame of sacred fire from heaven, the car- 
nival of vengeance now set in. " General Neale, 
you will see these prisoners properly executed," 
sternly commanded Havelock. Neale rolled up his 
sleeves, and gave his order : " First drag these 
devils through Christian blood ! " It was obeyed, 
and over the pools of the still warm blood of the 
so lately butchered women the men were trailed. 
Then, scores by scores, they were blown from the 
♦mouths of cannon, or hung from the branches of a 



202 



INDIA 



neighboring tree till it could bear no further weight 
of its ghastly fruit. 

Like looking down from the rim of a crater into 
the pit of fiery lava below, was it to stand on the 
very spot and listen to the tale of this volcanic out- 
break of human passion from the lips of an old 
soldier who had come in with Havelock's force, and 
been an eye-witness of this scene. 

Three ineffaceable memories will always linger 
in my mind as interpreters of these tragic scenes. 
The first, the Hindu temple which stands on the 
top of the ghat descending to the Ganges, and from 
the banks beside which the murderous fire was 
poured into the boats. The temple itself is carved 
and painted with obscenities so hideously revolting 
as to seem fit shrine to inspire such atrocities. The 
second will be that of the inscription over the gate 
of the cemetery, where beneath palms and feathery 
acacias sleep the majority of those who perished in 
the siege. The words were simply, " Tread softly." 
The third, the pathetic fitness of the Scripture 
passage chosen for the monument over the well 
into which were thrown the butchered women and 
children. It is from a verse of the Psalms, the 
startling realism of whose imagery of the wood- 
chopper and his chips had a thousand times im- 
pressed me, and which now seemed to revive its lit- 
eral sense : " Our bones are scattered at the grave's 
mouth, as when one cutteth and cleaveth wood 
upon the earth." 

Immense, however, as was the cost of the recon- 
quest, and terrible as were the passions let loose, 



CA WNPORE 



203 



every day one spends in India convinces him more 
profoundly of the infinite boon it is to this vast 
population to be held in subjection by a power at 
once so strong, enlightened, and humane as that of 
Great Britain. To leave once again to themselves 
these peoples of such diverse races and fanaticisms 
would be like opening all the cages in a menagerie, 
and letting jaguar, leopard, lion, rhinoceros fight 
out the , question of supremacy among themselves. 
The beast that would end off king would be the 
tiger ; and, as has significantly been added, the 
tiger would be the Mohammedan. 



j As one travels by rail across the vast fer- 
tile plains of northern India, and every now 
and then comes out on a city, with its temples, 
mosques, and palaces of Maharajas, or of wealthy 
merchants, the whole social and political history 
of India is explained at a glance. As a rule, 
there is but one step from the hovel to the pal- 
ace. Rude as the tepees of our North American 
Indians are the majority of the huts of the natives. 
Built, as a general rule, of dried mud, with no 
opening to the light and air but a door-frame 
minus a door, the roof a thatch of palm or bamboo 
grass, they literally swarm with children, and, no 
doubt, countless other tenants. Fifty or sixty of 
these huts are commonly huddled together, yet 
not so closely but that they are shaded with pic- 
turesque bananas, palms, and mangoes, the light 
and shade of which are glorified with the scarlet, 
green, and gold of the dresses of the women, and 
turned into an Eden of primeval innocence by 
the beautiful naked bodies, the animated bronze, 
of the children. Undue sympathy, however, for 
little boys and girls devoid of clothes is at 
once checked by the thought how vastly more 
comfortable they are without than with them. 
Besides, another happy reflection comes to the 



ORIENTAL SAVINGS-BANKS 205 



rescue. If too poor to wear clothes, there are 
none of them too poor to indulge in jewelry. 
Rarely a naked little tyke that has not silver 
bracelets on his wrists and silver anklets on his 
feet. 

" I can get along without necessities, but I must 
have luxuries," is in India no mere witty Gal- 
lic paradox. It is hard, practical common sense. 
To sell a nose-ring for a dress would be to an 
Indian woman a far wilder freak of insanity than 
for an American woman to sell her dress for a 
nose-ring, and would draw down upon her graver 
censure from her sex. Accordingly, many the ex- 
tremely poor Indian woman one meets, carrying 
on her head an unsightly load of dried cakes of 
cow-dung, the principal fuel, with both her arms 
six inches deep in bracelets, and both her an- 
kles six deep in anklets, not to speak of stone- 
set rings in both flanges and the central cartilage 
of the nose, together with a miscellaneous collection 
hanging from the upper circles and the lobes of 
the ears. 

In all conscience, this would seem jewelry 
enough for any reasonable woman in distressingly 
limited pecuniary circumstances to care to disport. 
Not at all. On the road one falls in with great 
troops of gypsies, who in addition wear on each 
toe a ring with a little tinkling bell attached, thus 
picturesquely illustrating the song, " She shall have 
music wherever she goes." Inevitably, is one car- 
ried back in imagination over two thousand years, 
as now in all its vividness is lighted up to him 



206 



INDIA 



the stern denunciation of Isaiah : " Because the 
daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with 
stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking 
and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with 
their feet : . . . therefore the Lord will take away 
the bravery of their tinkling ornaments, . . . the 
bracelets, ear-rings, and nose jewels," together, in 
the sacred text, with a catalogue of other feminine 
adornments I have not had the good fortune to 
encounter even in India, but which most likely 
prevail in circles from which, on grounds of faith 
and practice, I am unhappily debarred. 

But these poor, half-fed women I have been 
describing the sublime prophet could never have 
had the heart to denounce. The one and only 
savings-bank they have ever heard of is the nose, 
ears, wrists, ankles, and toes of a woman. There 
they store away their ancestral inheritance, their 
hard-earned savings, the future portion of their 
children. Scarcely would starvation induce them 
to break in upon the sacred hoard. And yet 
they, with a family of six, are living on two dol- 
lars and a half a month. Poor things, let them 
tinkle as they go ! Not of them, but of their wan- 
ton Nautch-girl sisters in the zenanas, did Isaiah 
speak. 

Continually, as we journeyed on, would the 
question arise, " Are these poor people at 
heart as miserable as their surroundings would 
seem to argue ? " It is a great relief to say that 
probably they are not. Theirs is a passive tern- 



INDIAN PESSIMISM 



207 



perament ; their work is a quiet routine, no demon 
of machinery goads them on to keep pace with its 
whirling wheels. With plenty of leisure for talk 
and laughter, they have no sons to put through 
Harvard; their daughters are married at ten or 
twelve ; they enter on the Nirvana of grandfather 
or grandmother at twenty-six ; and finally their re- 
ligion affords them, with its ceremonials and pil- 
grimages, a constant imaginative delight, broken, 
it is true, by some frightful nightmares. Few, 
indeed, the farmers, mechanics, or clerks who, 
with us, could get off for such week-long holiday 
tramps as they, to the temples of favorite deities 
or saints, — tramps on which they take along with 
them their wives and children and neighbors and 
friends, all seeing the world together, and at the 
same time washing away their sins. In fact, what 
Saratoga, the White Sulphur Springs, Newport, 
are to the well-off with us, that and more than 
that are Benares, Jagannath, and a host of other 
shrines, to millions of the poorest of the poor in 
India. 

Of course in the past history of India, wars, 
harryings, and burnings must have wrought inde- 
scribable misery. And yet in a country like this, 
and with such a people, devastations are rapidly 
recovered from. Human nature adapts itself to 
anything ; and I am inclined to think that, in the 
case of such a people, it is a good deal as with 
the hawks and the sparrows. The hawk pounces 
down, and there is a wild fluttering and screaming. 
He secures his victim, and flies away. Soon all 



208 



INDIA 



is forgotten, and the little birds are twittering and 
singing on the branches as before. 

In fine, what is so widely characterized as the 
deep-rooted melancholy and pessimism of India 
is a passive rather than an active, a soothing 
rather than an embittering, sentiment, at the last 
remove from the misanthropy of a Dean Swift 
rushing madly from a hateful world to "die of 
rage like a poisoned rat in his hole ; " nearer akin, 
indeed, to Jaques in the Forest of Arden, with 
his, " 1 can suck melancholy out of a song, as 
a weasel sucks eggs. More, I prithee, more." 
Rather does it take the form of a vague and 
dreamy sense of the evanescence of human life 
and of tranquil indifference to what it has to 
offer. All this coil is not worth the price. Toil 
is pain, care is fever, dreamy rest alone is sweet. 
As opium to the nerves, such is religion to the 
spirit, the delicate haze that dissolves the hard out- 
lines of reality, the sense of the serene universal 
life that quiets down all fret of the finite. 

No wonder, then, that in India opium and reli- 
gion are craved by the peasant as the two great tran- 
quillizers. Thus among the causes of the final utter 
extinction of Buddhism in the land of its birth, 
and the rehabilitation in public favor of its rival, 
such scholars as Barth are disposed to rank chief 
the morbid monotony, in its later developments, of 
the Buddhistic insistence on an utterly pessimistic 
view of human existence along with a return to 
ascetic practices, all at the cost of the present 
realized peace so beautifully illustrated in the life 



SNAKES 



209 



of its founder. Indeed, in original Buddhism, 
pessimism served but as the negative to a positive, 
but as the vanishing point of the finite for entrance 
on non-finite blessedness. It was the Oriental 
solution of the paradox of losing the life to find it, 
of the paradox of St. Paul, " poor, yet making 
many rich, having nothing, and yet possessing all 
things." And so it became a gospel of present 
salvation from all consciousness of the ills of ex- 
istence to millions, alike of the poor and ignorant 
who in such a climate crave mainly the feeling of 
sensuous — not sensual — repose, and to the wealthy 
and powerful who were wooed by it to turn away 
from the greeds and ambitions that heat the blood 
and fret the spirit toward the interior enjoyment 
of those gentle and kindly feelings in which alone 
tranquillity and peace abide. 

Back in our own childhood days, many the 
moral drawn for our improvement from 
the bellicose propensities of cats and dogs in con- 
trast with the loving spirit that should prevail in 
well-regulated households of little boys and girls. 
In India one often wonders whether the stupen- 
dous scale upon which this lesson is illustrated on 
the part of the whole animal creation has not had 
a vast deal to do with the depth of the national 
reaction in favor of mental peace. While the men, 
women, and children are vegetarians, all the other 
members of creation, from the Bengal tiger to the 
most invisible gnat, are not, Such apparatus of 
stings, claws, fangs, suction-tubes, incisors, all ex- 



210 



INDIA 



quisitely contrived for the partition and assimilation 
of flesh and blood, hardly elsewhere can be par- 
alleled. And yet nowhere else does such aversion 
prevail against taking life. When one sees great 
troops of stark-naked fakirs and mathematically 
calculates the area of surface they expose in invita- 
tion to mosquitoes, gnats, ants, ticks, and chigres, 
— not to speak of the graver temptations opened 
up to snakes, leopards, and lions, — one is lost in 
admiration of the positive refusal on the part of 
the fakir to retort in kind. In reality can he tran- 
quilly " meditate the absolute and immutable " on 
an outdoor carpet of ants and under a canopy of 
gnats and feel " I am Brahma, and fiery skin and 
stinging pismire are but figments of a dream," 
while, with us, a single fly is enough to take all the 
tenderness out of a love-letter, the soundness out 
of a legal brief, nay, all the devoutness even out of 
a sermon ? If he can, then what a joint miracle 
of interior absorption and exterior cuticular indu- 
ration ! The Occidental world needs such men as 
missionaries. 

In view, then, of the richness and variety of 
the animal kingdom in India, and of its probable 
psychologic connection with certain of the most 
striking traits of the inhabitants, it would seem 
invidious on the part of the traveler to omit his 
meed of tribute to such divisions of it as espe- 
cially have interested and instructed him. So 
personally I feel moved to devote a few words to 
snakes. 

In Ceylon more people are killed by falls from 



GAUDIUM CER TAMINIS 211 



cocoa-nut palms than perish from snake-bites. Not 
that this is to be construed in mitigation of snakes, 
but it does seem to emphasize the moral respon- 
sibility of one portion of the globe for another 
in thus so clearly connecting every little cocoa- 
nut-eating boy at home in guilty complicity with 
the awful fate of widowhood in India. None the 
less, snakes abound everywhere, especially hooded 
cobras, so enshrined in religious veneration that 
not even the loss of a favorite child will induce 
any but the lowest caste Hindus to kill one of 
them. 

From these low-caste Hindus is it that are re- 
cruited the ranks of the so-called snake-charmers, 
itinerant showmen whose main charm consists 
in cutting out the fangs and poison sacs of the 
brutes before disporting with them in public. Even 
then the hateful reptiles maintain a certain pres- 
tige of horror which sets fascinating cold chills 
running down the back as, spite of the loss of 
their venomous weapons, they still keep striking 
out in the most vicious manner. That the moral- 
ity of every act lies solely in its intention is made 
plain to the obtusest ethical observers. Still, no 
intelligent traveler is willing to content himself 
with cobras with their fangs cut out, more than 
with tigers lapping gruel instead of blood. He 
wants to see the frightful reptile in all his terror 
and all his malignity, and this, if he will pay the 
price, the snake-charmers will give him a chance 
to witness in a fight between a full-fanged cobra 
and a mongoose. 



212 



INDIA 



v So imperfect are the sympathies of the 
average man with the cobra that from a 
purely spiritual point of view a fight between him 
and a mongoose has none of the drawbacks in the 
way of wounded sensibilities attendant on an en- 
counter between two creatures of the higher rank 
of dogs. Spite of his adoption of the hood of a 
devout Carmelite, the cobra remains at heart a 
sinuous, slimy, pestiferous brute, whom hardly the 
Buddha could take home to his bosom and love. 
He glides into the arena, moreover, guilty of the 
blood of at least ten thousand men, women, and chil- 
dren a year in his native land. His adversary, on 
the other hand, is a lithe, mercurial, lightning-swift 
little lemur, of ferret or weasel build, — an electric 
flash of intelligence and aim irresistibly remind- 
ing one, in temperament and fibre, of the miracu- 
lous French scholastic champion Abelard, all on a 
quiver for an intellectual set-to with the most re- 
doubtable swash-buckler of Nominalism or Real- 
ism, William of Champeaux or other. The very 
prince of subtle acumen, ready to let fly in an in- 
stant and with unerring aim at every joint in the 
armor of his antagonist, the mongoose sails into 
battle like the marvelous Frenchman, a derisive 
smile playing around his white teeth that prophe- 
sies victory from the start. 

Plainly at the very outset the cobra is gravely 
disconcerted and would be glad to slink out of 
the controversy through any knot-hole. The con- 
vincing logical categories on which hitherto he 
has relied so confidently seem inconclusive in the 



GAUDIUM CER T A MINIS 213 



presence of an intelligence so much more acute. 
But there is no escape. Every hair erect with 
metaphysical frenzy and eyes blood-shot with bat- 
tle-flame, electric Abelard is circling round him. 
So out the cobra lashes with his terrible fangs in 
what is meant to be a mortal argument. Lightly 
the mongoose springs aside or leaps whole feet into 
the air, and the fangs strike idly into invulner- 
able space ; while before the cobra can recover 
himself his quicksilver antagonist has got in on 
tail or body an irritating argumentative nip with 
his ferret teeth. 

So far, all this on the mongoose's part is but 
a pleasant by-play of logical fence. His intuitive 
mind is simply preluding with the graver issue. 
Just where the force of his adversary's major pre- 
mise lies is to him as plain as day, and that it lies 
not in his body or tail but in his brain. An un- 
guarded movement, a promising opening, and with 
a lightning-swift spring through the air, the infal- 
lible logician has seized the cobra just back of the 
head where the turn is too short to bring the fangs 
to bear. Master of the situation, intellect and 
teeth are now concentrated on the single point at 
stake. All in vain the infuriated cobra writhes his 
coils round the mongoose's body, rolls him over 
and over along the arena, and thrashes him on the 
ground. Not for a moment is the clearness of his 
mental vision distracted by such specious sophis- 
tries. Steadily he hangs on to the major premise, 
gnawing his way ever higher and higher up till 
at last his keen-ground metaphysical teeth have 



214 



INDIA 



pierced the brain. The quick of the controversy 
is reached and forever silenced. William of Cham- 
peaux lies stark and still, while without waste of 
further breath, victorious Abelard quietly with- 
draws from the university arena, leaving the as- 
sembled students lost in admiration at the bril- 
liancy of his controversial tactics. 

Surely, if fighting there must be, here is a kind 
in which the intellectual element so dominates 
the brutal as to render it distinctly educational. 
Wholly beyond, moreover, and realms above its 
mere dazzling brilliancy is felt its profound ethical 
and historical significance ; for, presumptuously as 
has been challenged for itself by another world- 
famous exhibition the title of the " Greatest Moral 
Show on Earth," this fairly may claim its right to 
the proud appellation. Frivolous, indeed, must be 
the nature on whose imagination the scene does 
not impress itself as a sublime piece of symbolism 
in which nothing less momentous is typified than 
the elemental struggle of light and darkness, good 
and evil. " Ah ! " soliloquizes the more reflective 
mind, — " ah ! that instead of poor, scatter-brained 
mother Eve our 6 first parent ' had been the mon- 
goose. How different, then, the issue of the primal 
battles with the serpent, and how changed the sub- 
sequent event of human history ! " 



VI. 



j Before going on to record the impressions 
left by Agra and Delhi, the two most splen- 
did capitals of the Mogul dynasty, a brief historical 
sketch may not be out of place. 

Several chapters back, a comparison was made 
between the Alps and the plain of Lombardy on 
the one hand and, on the other, the Himalayas 
and the enormous level stretches of northern India, 
the object being to show on how vastly more colos- 
sal a geological scale India was fashioned. Pre- 
cisely the same overpowering impression on the 
imagination is made the moment one tries to form 
an adequate conception of the relation in which 
India has ever stood to the enormous races and 
nationalities environing her for thousands of miles 
to the west and the north, — in Arabia, Persia, 
Afghanistan, Turkestan, China, Tartary. 

As one reads the story of the fall of the Roman 
Empire, he is awed at the thought of the hordes 
of Goths, Vandals, Lombards, Teutons, that stood 
ready to pour down on that narrow fringe of civili- 
zation around the Mediterranean; but how petty 
in numbers and range were these in comparison 
with the inconceivably vaster hordes — when once 
they should become unified under a conquering re- 
ligion — to be drawn from the enormous expanses 



216 



INDIA 



of western and northern Asia ! One little swoop 
of their swarms in the far-back days of Attila came 
near destroying the Roman Empire ; and yet this 
was but as a single wave of the ocean to the succes- 
sive myriads of them breaking on and over the 
northern rock-barriers of India. Indeed, in think- 
ing of Asia in comparison with Europe, one is 
perpetually reminded of a saying of Alexander the 
Great after he had embarked on his career of 
Oriental conquest : " When I get a dispatch from 
my little kingdom of Macedon, reporting to me the 
taking of some insignificant hill town or of a suc- 
cessful fight for the capture of a ford, I seem to be 
reading of the battles of the frogs and mice." 

Through the birth and religion of Mohammed, 
who died in 632 a. d., came the flash that was to 
set aflame, not in one, but in century-successive, 
prairie fires, these vast inflammable areas of races 
and nationalities. Here was a religion which made 
paradise and plunder, loyalty and looting, one and 
indivisible, — an entrancing harmony of the ferocity 
of nature with the attractions of grace. " The pos- 
sessions of the infidel are the inheritance of the 
faithful," had been the proclamation of the Prophet 
himself. What sanguinary Afghan, bloodthirsty 
Turcoman, ugly, squint-eyed Tartar, but would 
yearn to become a child of Allah when the news 
of such a gospel should reach him in his rugged 
mountain fastnesses, or on his wide, grass-waving 
steppes ? 

Well-nigh from the outset of the rise of the 
Mohammedan power, India was the Roman Empire 



ELIMINATING THE TARTAR 217 

of the south of Asia, on which the covetous eyes of 
the faithful were fixed. " Lieber Gott ! " cried out 
rough-and-ready General Bliicher, when he first 
saw London, " what a city to loot ! " What might 
not have been said of India, with its mines of gold 
and jewels, its temples heaped with treasures, its 
cities teeming with manufactories of silks and 
tissues of gold, its palaces of kings and princes ? 
As early as 650 began the invasions from Arabia, 
while meantime conquests were pushed through 
Persia and clear up to the Hindu Kush. For cen- 
turies the struggle went on, ever increasing in fury 
and weight of numbers as the vast hordes of the 
north came under Mohammedan sway. Province 
after province was conquered and securely held, 
while at times devastating incursions like that of 
Timur, the Tartar, in 1398, swept everything help- 
lessly before them. Not, however, till the invasion 
of Babar, sixth in descent from the terrible Timur, 
was anything like the foundation laid of a perma- 
nent Mohammedan dynasty ruling all India, — the 
famous Mogul dynasty, which continued on, in 
shadow at least, till, in the Sepoy rebellion, the 
last of its princes were dragged out from the sub- 
terranean chambers of their ancestors' tomb and 
shot dead by brutal Hodson of Hodson's Horse. 

The term Mogul dynasty can easily become 
misleading, suggestive as it is of the stiff- 
haired, yellow-faced, squint-eyed Tartar. Long 
before the consolidation every trace of this kind 
of physical, mental, and moral strabismus had 



218 



INDIA 



been drowned out of the royal family in overpower- 
ing mixtures of Afghan, Persian, Circassian, Sara- 
cen, Jewish, even Christian blood. Whatever the 
pros and cons as to polygamy, one thing is cer- 
tain, — polygamy of the extra-racial kind is good 
for the Tartar. Cut off from, or aesthetically es- 
chewing, Tartar wives, he is enabled steadily to 
efface himself for the benefit of his posterity. 
What with Aryan and Semitic wives at freest 
command, — the only two that, historically, are 
worthy of consideration, — he, in the course of 
generations, ultimately reduces to zero his horse- 
mane hair, squint eyes, and tallow face, and along 
with these their corresponding intellectual, aesthetic, 
and moral qualities. Then scratch his skin, and you 
will not find the Tartar. With the addition of 
the plural for the singular, the adage now proves 
true that a man owes all he is to — his mothers. 

No, you will not find the Tartar in the emperors 
of the so-called Mogul dynasty. Swiftly they estab- 
lished a brilliant, cosmopolitan, and, in many ways, 
wise and scientific administration. In 1556, only 
sixty years after Babar's conquest, began the won- 
derful half -century reign of Akbar the Great, which 
inaugurated the renaissance age of India. Art, 
literature, philosophy, the spirit of cosmopolitan 
tolerance, all took a new start. Max Miiller, in- 
deed, pronounces Akbar the first founder of a "com- 
parative study of the religions of the world" — 
even anticipating Chicago ! Nothing so delighted 
him as to assemble learned Brahmans, Mussulmans, 
Zoroastrians, Jews, Jesuit padres, and skeptical 



ELIMINATING THE TARTAR 219 



philosophers, and to hear them argue with one 
another. " Gradually," says a bitter Mohammedan 
hater of his " spirit of inquiry, opposed to every 
Islamitic principle," — " gradually there grew, as the 
outline on a stone, the conviction in his heart that 
there were sensible men in all religions and abste- 
mious thinkers." No mere intellectual critic, but 
a man profoundly devout in heart, Akbar finally 
built up a religion of his own, — a combination 
of all he thought wisest and best in Brahmanical 
teaching, Zoroastrian fire-worship, Mohammedan 
morality, and Christian dogma, even substituting 
for the usual formula, " Bismallah," etc., of Islam, 
the rather compound one of 

" thou whose names are Jesus and Christ, 
We praise thee : there is no one beside thee, O God ! " 

As one reads the story of Akbar' s attitude 
toward the rival religions, impossible it is, spite 
of Max Miiller's assertion, not to call to mind 
King Solomon, and to raise the historical query 
whether the title of first founder of the study of 
comparative religions does not more fitly belong 
to him. The cases are strikingly parallel. The 
old desert faith of the Hebrews had weakened ; 
contact with Egypt and Assyria had brought rival 
religions into comparison ; equally excellent wives 
from Tyre, Sidon, Babylon, Thebes, and Mem- 
phis, had softened the heart of the wisest of kings, 
and rendered him tender toward their respective 
creeds ; and, besides all this, Solomon was himself 
a man of restless and subtle intellect. Akbar's 
was, no doubt, the devouter nature of the two ; 



220 



INDIA 



yet still the renaissance in India and the renais- 
sance in J udasa were such essentially similar phe- 
nomena, and so equally bound up with the individ- 
uality of two highly intellectual and widely married 
Oriental sovereigns, that it may not seem pre- 
sumptuous to submit even to a Max Miiller the 
propriety of a reconsideration of his statement. 
Certain it is that Akbar's Christian wife Mary 
exerted over his life an influence at once liber- 
alizing and exalting, and so inclined his heart 
towards her creed. The subject at any rate opens 
up a novel chapter in the study of the part woman 
has played in the historical development of reli- 
gion. 

In Agra, Akbar the Great built for his 
glory and pleasure a gigantic fortress-palace 
a mile and a half in circuit, its massive crenelated 
walls seventy feet in height, entered on four sides 
by stupendous gateways, in themselves at once forts 
and sumptuous palaces. Within the vast inclos- 
ure there is room not merely for storehouses 
against a siege, barracks for the soldiery, dormi- 
tories for the retainers and troops of servants, 
grounds for horse-exercise, sports and elephant- 
fights, but immense areas for mosques, audience- 
halls, gardens, baths, zenanas. For air and fresh- 
ness, along the top of the massive sandstone walls, 
are exquisitely wrought towers of pure white mar- 
ble and ranges of apartments for noonday siestas ; 
while on the marble surface of their level roofs 
above stretch wide spaces for gatherings in the 



AGRA 



221 



cool of the evening or for lying out and sleep- 
ing under the stars. All command broad views 
over the richly cultivated country, the river Jumna 
winding in great sweeps through the landscape. 
It is, in fine, the Alhambra of India, the fortress 
for safety ; the audience-halls for the administra- 
tion of justice and the reception of ambassadors ; 
the mosque for the worship of Allah ; the zenanas 
for the beauties of Cashmere, Persia, Syria ; the 
palaces for splendor, luxury, repose ; the gardens, 
fountains, canals, and baths for coolness, perfume, 
murmuring sounds. 

Apart from the mosques, the Saracenic Moham- 
medan architecture of India has one unfailing char- 
acteristic. It makes a rich, sensuous appeal to 
common human nature, and requires for its full 
appreciation no spiritual elevation of soul. Every 
man who, hot and thirsty, has felt the rapture of 
a plunge into a cool brook or of a long, delicious 
draught from a bubbling spring, has in himself 
the fundamental elements of sense and feeling to 
which this architecture and its surroundings are 
addressed. Every man, furthermore, who as he 
walks by the seashore delights to pluck a hand- 
ful of bayberry leaves and eagerly inhale their 
aromatic perfume ; every man who on a hot July 1 
afternoon feels the luxury of a dreamy siesta in 
his hammock, with a delicious breeze stealing over 
him ; every man who finds it paradise to have his 
inamorata take her guitar and sing soothing songs 
to him while he reposes his weary Olympian brow 
on a sofa-cushion, — is, just in so far, perfectly 



222 



INDIA 



capable of appreciating the aesthetic sense of an 
Akbar the Great or a Shah J ehan, when — 

" In Xanadu did Kubla Khan 
A stately pleasure-dome decree, 
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran 
Through caverns measureless to man 
Down to a sunless sea." 

In India the climate is tropical. Air and shade 
are the primal requisites. There must be no stair- 
cases to climb. Apartment must succeed apart- 
ment on the same level. The roofs, too, must be 
utilized for ample spaces for the enjoyment of 
the starlight and the moonlight and the sweet sleep 
to be had on them. Still other airy buildings must 
be set a-top these roofs for wider outlook or yet 
more sequestered privacy. Screens of openwork 
marble, cut in exquisite patterns of vines and 
palms and lilies and pomegranates, shall be the 
sole walls of these buildings, that the jessamine- 
scented breezes may steal through them, and the 
brighter sunlight be transfigured into a golden 
twilight, and the moonlight into mysterious dream- 
light. 

Such, then, was the fairy-land, the midsummer- 
night's dream, that Akbar the Great undertook 
to make reality within the fort of Agra, and which 
his successors, Jehangir and Shah Jehan, carried 
to completeness. The yearning of Abt Vogler to 
arrest and make permanent the ravishment of his 
manifold music there found its genii to achieve the 
task. The fullness of time had come. Long be- 
fore had the beauty-loving Saracenic genius, seiz- 



INFLUENCE OF WOMAN 



223 



ing upon the treasures of Greek and Roman archi- 
tecture in the East, developed out of them bewitch- 
ing architectural types suited to embody its own 
inborn cravings. Syria and Persia were full of 
master-builders ; and from Italy, too, they could be 
drawn without stint. In India there were trea- 
suries of gold and silver, and millions of subjects 
to toil for a pittance. Over all presided the un- 
dying genius of Greece in imperishable architect- 
ural forms that needed only modifications through 
the Saracenic arch, the extension of an inclined 
piazza roof for shade, and the freer use of grace- 
ful minarets and open cupolas, to evolve a new 
order, which for symmetry, grace, and appeal to 
the pleasure-craving, dreamy side of human nature 
is without rival in the world. 

Even in our own country, the relation 
borne by woman to architectural construc- 
tion has been made a subject of grave comment 
by philosophic minds, — especially in its bearing 
on the multiplication of closets and corresponding 
shrinkage of size in the living and sleeping rooms, 
to leave space for the closets. In the Orient this 
influence becomes still more marked. A man with 
three hundred wives requires, of course, a domes- 
tic establishment differently arranged from that 
of a man with only one. Take, for example, the 
single instance of adequate provision for bathing. 
Were there but one little bath-room in so hot a 
climate, and did each several wife insist on lying 
in the tub half the day and the rest of the day on 



224 



INDIA 



a Persian rug beside it, it will readily be seen 
that serious domestic complications might arise. 
Construct, on the other hand, immense marble 
halls, with swimming-pools of marble thirty feet 
long, and large areas of marble floors, on which 
could be laid a hundred rugs, whereon the beau- 
ties of India, Circassia, and Syria might stretch out 
and doze or gossip or eat sweetmeats, then what 
enhanced prospects of marital peace would at once 
ensue ! Inlay the marble walls of these halls with 
exquisite designs in precious stones, and roof them 
with delicate mirror-work overrun with fairy-like 
marble traceries of vines and lilies, and why should 
not all be satisfied with bathing, dozing, telling 
stories, and doing nothing all day long ? 

Again, for an example of the influence of woman 
on architecture, take the so-called Jasmine Tower, 
erected by Shah Jehan for his favorite sultana. 
It overhangs the wall of the fortress, and is in- 
wrought with such indescribable beauty of open- 
work marble screens as to drive the fancy wild. 
Now Shah Jehan was extremely fond of playing 
chess with his prime vizier ; but, like most Orien- 
tal sovereigns, he was also fond of mitigating the 
asperities of too protracted thought. So, on the 
floor of the court before the Jasmine Tower, needs 
must he have a chess-board constructed of marble 
flagging, each flag-stone large enough for a man 
or woman to stand on freely. Then, at a signal, 
the requisite numbers of his wives, gorgeously ar- 
rayed as kings and queens and bishops and knights 
and pawns, would file out of the zenana, while, 



THE OASIS 



225 



luxuriously seated on their divans, Shah Jehan 
and the vizier would direct with finger or word 
the complicated movements of the game of living 
chess. In this way was taken off the perhaps 
too severe intellectual edge of an otherwise so 
exacting pastime. 

Such little straws as these must serve to show 
which way the wind blows in the Mohammedan 
domestic architecture of India; and I must leave 
it to the imagination of my readers to carry these 
hints out into all the details of gardens and foun- 
tains and successive halls of splendor, and pools 
and marble canals mirroring and repeating in their 
transfigured reflections the dream-world above. 
This Saracenic Mohammedan architecture, as I 
have said before, is the apotheosis of sensuous 
sestheticism. It has no lift to it, no ideal beyond 
what it sees already perfect. " If paradise be any- 
where it is here, here, here ! " wrote Shah Jehan 
over one of the portals. A man living under such 
conditions would, I should think, struggle fiercely 
never to die. What could there be to his sense- 
restricted imagination in the vision, "Eye hath 
not seen, nor ear heard, neither heart conceived the 
things God hath in store "? No. "If paradise be 
anywhere, it is here, it is here ! " • 

In the fiery, sun-blistered deserts of Arabia, 
in which Mohammedanism took its rise, the 
physical basis of all imaginative visions of the para- 
dise yearned after was the oasis. Paradise, indeed, 
was the oasis when the tongue -parched wayfarer 



226 



INDIA 



struggled, faint and exhausted, out of the burning 
sands, and flung himself down under the shade of 
its palms and mimosas, and drank deep draughts 
from its delicious springs. Allah had there done 
his supremest creative feat, and revealed himself 
in the highest to his creatures. What more divine 1 
could he bring to pass in reward of the faithful 
than to make just this kind of experience everlast- 
ing, — with the entrancing addition of the houris? 
Such, then, was the vision of the celestial home ; 
and the next step was to try to make it come on 
earth, even as it lay awaiting in paradise. 

This primitive idea of the oasis has dominated 
the mind of Mohammedanism wherever the faith 
has spread ; and Saracenic domestic and, I may 
add, mortuary architecture is but its full and final 
flower. In it are the original sense-impressions of 
the blissful change from the glare of the desert to 
the shade of the palms and the refreshment of the 
springs, but raised to the seventh aesthetic heaven. 
In his infinite mercy, had it not pleased Allah to 
create for the faithful a substance called marble, 
snowy white as his own purity; among stones, a 
kind of precious stone enduring as granite and yet 
capable of being made translucent as amber, and 
wreathed all over with the most delicate traceries 
of vines and flowers ? Then, further, to relieve its 
perhaps too great monotony of white, had it not 
equally pleased Allah to create the beryl, the onyx, 
the jasper, the lapis lazuli, wherewith to inlay it, 
and to assure delightful variety of hue and sheen ? 
Still more, that all suggestion of glare might 



THE TAJ MAHAL 



227 



utterly be removed, had not Allah caused to grow 
the palm, the tamarind, the cypress, the banyan, 
the orange, wherein to embower and relieve the 
shining white, and, along with these, made pure 
crystal waters to leap up in fountains, and fill the 
pools of courts, and reflect from the mirrored sur- 
face the porticoes and minarets and domes, and 
houris arrayed in robes of cashmere or unarrayed 
in aught but their own surpassing charms ? 

Now, it is in this ineffable unity of gardens, 
terraces, canals, fountains, minarets, snow-white 
domes, that lie the witchery and seduction of 
India's Saracenic architecture. All is dissolved 
into one melodious music, every object transfigured 
into element of one fairy-land. The eye is fed with 
gracious forms, the ear with murmuring sounds, the 
scent with delicious perfumes. Alternate sensations 
of languorous heat and refreshing coolness, of thirst 
and of oranges hanging down to slake it with, of 
invitation to rest with appeal to wander leisurely 
on, sensuously appeal to blended body and soul. 

^ There are two buildings in Agra which it is 
considered a mark of barbarism not to rave 
over, — the one, the Pearl Mosque within the walls 
of the fort ; the other, the Taj Mahal, on the curv- 
ing bank of the river Jumna, a mile or more away 
from the fort. The latter is the memorial tomb 
of Shah Jehan's favorite wife, Muntaz Mahal, 
" Chosen of the Palace." Taj is but the diminu- 
tive, the pet name of endearment for Muntaz, as 
we should say Nell for Ellen. 



228 



INDIA 



Now, in respect of the first of these two, the 
Pearl Mosque, no fear of aesthetic excommunication 
will prevent my saying that it suffers most severely 
from the lack of just that which is the crowning 
fascination of most Saracenic buildings. The glare 
of the desert, the fatal monotony of the unrelieved 
whiteness of marble, the absence anywhere of the 
oasis, with its springs and overshadowing trees, 
render it a place almost intolerable under the sun 
of India. Surpassingly beautiful are its outlines, 
with its pillared aisles, its three snowy domes, and 
its delicately carved cloisters surrounding the sides 
of the open court-yard ; and in the rosy flush of 
early dawn, or under the dream-spell of moonlight, 
one might love to linger there, but not when the 
sun is riding high in the heavens. Then the direct 
smiting rays or their equally blinding reflections 
pierce everywhere ; and one can conceive of none 
but a half -crazed fakir, making a merit of a crema- 
tory of the living flesh, ever seeking it as a place 
of prayer. 

But of the Taj Mahal, in contrast, what shall I 
say? It is by thousands of judges pronounced the 
most beautiful building in the world ; but never a 
one of them who has first drunk its intoxicating 
soma juice is ever again competent to pass a calmly 
reasoned verdict, whether it is or is not. Nor does 
it make any difference who beholds it. The most 
ideal young American girl, the driest student of 
comparative architecture, the most commonplace 
British Philistine, the emptiest-headed globe-trotter 
who has raked together money enough to go round 



THE TAJ MAHAL 



229 



the world and return home the same, only a bit 
more confused than he set out, — all are equally 
carried away, all lifted to the seventh heaven of 
their respective (short or long) celestial Jacob's 
ladders. 

The Taj is not a building. It is an Arabian 
Night's dream, in which a building plays a queenly 
part. It is a tropical orchestra, in which earth, 
sky, grove, waters, flowers, precious stones, moon- 
orbed domes, snowy pinnacles, blend and flow into 
one Mozart symphony. AH along on the way from 
Calcutta to Agra I had seen alabaster models of 
the Taj, and said to myself sadly, " Is that all ? " 
The models left out only the golden clouds from 
around the sinking sun, the shining waters from 
beneath the rising moon, the lover's soul from the 
spell of his mistress's song, — only that, and no- 
thing more ! 

One enters the inclosure of the Taj by a superb 
gateway, through whose lofty arch he looks along 
the sky, grove, and dome reflecting surface of a 
marble-paved canal, bordered on either side by wide 
paths and beds of flowers and flanked by lines of 
dark, spiry cypress-trees, backed with groves on 
either hand. In vista at the end of this magic 
avenue, and repeated in transfiguration in the 
water, stands the Taj. How superb a setting ! 
The marble platform on which it rests is a square 
three hundred and thirteen feet each way and 
eighteen feet in height. From each of the four 
corners mounts high aloft an indescribably graceful 
minaret, relieved in its ascent by three hanging 



230 



INDIA 



galleries and surmounted by the beautiful Saracenic 
cupola. There in the middle of the grand plat- 
form rises the Taj, itself like the pinnacles, all of 
snowy, exquisitely carved marble, the finial of its 
marble dome two hundred and twenty feet aloft in 
the blue sky. Further, as one still looks out from 
the gateway, stretch to the right and left the great 
tropical gardens, beautiful with palms, mimosas, 
and tamarinds, lighted up by the splendor of the 
plumage of darting paroquets, and with a glory of 
scarlet, purple, and gold in the trailing vines. 

I do not know whether the Taj is the most 
beautiful building in the world or not. I never 
want to know. If Euclid demonstrated to me in 
ten immutable axioms and ten immutable deduc- 
tions from them that it was not, it would make no 
difference. I only know that in its combination 
with earth and sky it presents the most fairy-like 
scene on earth. Thought is not : in enjoyment it 
expires. 

I saw the Taj by early morning light, by sunset 
light, and by moonlight, when every trace of ma- 
teriality was so dissolved in ethereal spirit that 
it seemed as though all material barriers were 
melted away, and the living here and the living 
there must float together and feel neither out of 
sphere. And yet no glare, even of fiercest noon- 
day, has power to break the poetic spell. Peren- 
nial oasis in life's so frequent waste, against it ver- 
dure, wellspring of delight, lotus land of dreams, 
no Libyan desert can prevail. And just as within 
its inmost shrine, illuminated not by windows, but 



THE TAJ MAHAL 



231 



only through the graceful openwork sprays of vines 
and flowers chiseled in marble screens, the blaze 
of the midday sunshine is transfigured into a 
soft, golden haze, so equally there the harshest 
sounds are transformed into melodious music. Let 
a strain be sung by the most discordant voice, 
even were it a snatch of a simple song, and forth- 
with is it taken up as by a choir of angels and 
sent circling and circling through the tremulously 
vibrating vault above, sweet and jubilant, as over 
Bethlehem the "Hymn of the Nativity." No word 
is repeated; only, as it were, the theme of the 
musician is taken up and revealed in its divine 
intent, revealed as he, too, shall later hear it, 
stored away and enriched in the sanctifying mem- 
ory of God. All seems imbued as by an instinct 
of chaste purity that will be sullied by nothing 
discordant or profane, but which ignores it, and 
soars above it into a celestial realm. Even the 
sleeping woman there, the wife and mother who 
died in childbirth pangs, and in tender memory 
of whom all this miracle of beauty was evoked, 
suggests no thought of pain. 



VII. 



j What more fitting preface to the little I 
shall have space to say about Delhi than 
the passionate cry of the French savant, James 
Darmesteter ? " Delhi the royal ! Delhi the im- 
perial ! Delhi the bleeding ! I have had but four 
days to wander among thy ruins and thy tombs : 
it will be the eternal regret of my life. For two 
thousand years has the heart of India beaten 
there, whatever the color of the blood — Aryan, 
Turk, Afghan, Mogul — that the waves of invasion 
rolled thither. Whosoever would breathe with 
one breath the India of Brahma and the India of 
Allah, let him traverse, stone by stone, the forty- 
five square miles which Delhi in succession, along 
the banks of the Jumna, has peopled with ruins 
and phantoms." 

Yes, the India of Brahma and the India of 
Allah, the awe-imposing phantoms of both are 
there. Thither Shah Jehan, sated with the mag- 
nificence of Agra, removed his court, and built 
a new Alhambra, rivaling in splendor and luxury 
the one he had left behind, while all about him 
in the area of forty square miles lay the ruins of 
the earlier perished cities of Afghan, Tartar, Per- 
sian conquerors, and of the far-back Hindu rulers. 
Ruined and deserted capitols, tenanted now but 



DELHI 



233 



by bats, owls, and fakirs, are the historical land- 
marks of India, telling in monotony of repetition 
the story of the ravages and insane caprices of 
tyrannic and irresponsible power to which has been 
subjected this veritable " Niobe of nations." Next 
to the passion of conquest, the passion of building 
strikes the deepest root into the world's great 
despots, — manifesting itself in all varieties of 
ways, from rearing pyramids of skulls with Timur 
to rearing pyramids of Gizeh with the Egyptian 
Pharaohs. The world must hold in everlasting 
remembrance the virtues of such benefactors ; and 
to this end, in exquisite irony of logic, one after 
the other they demolish the records of the virtues 
of their predecessors, to rebuild with their mate- 
rial, only in turn to have their own demolished 
that other phantoms may commemorate their 
imperishable glory. Did Akbar the Great have 
some premonition of this ironical smile in the 
sleeve of Fate, when at Fatehpur-Sikri, after 
building a magnificent city, — now deserted, — in 
remembrance of a great victory of his grandfather 
Babar, he inscribed over its stupendous gateway : 
" Isa (Jesus), on whom be peace! said, 6 The 
world is a bridge ; pass over it, but build no house 
on it ? 

Delhi has been called the Rome of India. In 
vastness and impressiveness of ruins it is a hun- 
dred Homes. When, in comparison, one recalls 
the walls of Eome as they exist to-day, he credits 
with entire historical faith the story of Romulus 
killing his brother Remus for the little innuendo 



234 



INDIA 



implied in a hop, skip, and jump over them. Had 
Remus tried the like feat with the Cyclopean walls 
of Tughlakabad, one of the abandoned cities of 
Delhi, it would have been his own feelings that 
felt hurt and not those of Romulus. No : here is 
the work of giants. Hundred-armed Briareus, with 
gangs of Titans under him to quarry and heave, 
must have taken the contract for these stupendous 
towers and battlements. Deserted now for centu- 
ries, blackened with age, shaken with earthquakes, 
the city once within eaten out by the mordant tooth 
of Time, nothing left behind but a vast crater — how 
they overwhelm the mind, as, ant-like, one creeps 
along their awful base ! Then the mausoleum of 
ferocious old Tughlak himself, " the bloody king," 
outside the south wall of the city, and once sur- 
rounded with a lake! It looks an impregnable 
fortress in itself. So terrible his record and so 
dire the estimate of the fate before him in the 
world to come, that his successor piously purchased 
at great expense written quittances of all he had 
cruelly outraged on earth and stored them in an 
iron chest at the head of the tomb, to be close at 
hand against the Day of Judgment. But, even with 
these authentic receipts in full, the sanguinary old 
tyrant seems to have looked forward with small 
relief to the call of the Mohammedan angel of the 
resurrection. How he barricaded himself in with 
gigantic walls and battlements, as though dynamite 
itself should never blow his dogged soul out of its 
fastness, and summon it before any tribunal short 
of its own ferocious will ! 



DELHI 



235 



Four miles from there, under the shadow of the 
superb five-storied tower, the Kutb Minar, one 
comes upon another wilderness of Titanic ruins. 
Each fresh conqueror must found a new city to 
perpetuate his glory. Why should a taste for 
building have been implanted in the heart by Allah, 
and millions of cunning workmen put at one's 
disposal, but to create something with them that 
shall add an eighth wonder to the world ? Besides, 
is not this the site of the original Hindu city of 
Dilli, where idolaters have spent centuries in mak- 
ing all magnificent with temples ? Tear them down ! 
Why go to the rude quarries for stone when Allah's 
blaspheming enemies have already hewn it for the 
faithful into walls and pillars? Only with divin- 
est patience first mutilate every face of myriad 
carved god or goddess; for is it not written, "Thou 
shalt not make unto thyself any graven image"? 
Enough will then remain of Hindu, Buddhist, Jain 
glories of architecture — first piously smitten hard 
enough in the teeth to satisfy the sacred precept of 
the law — wherewith to rear magnificent cloisters. 
Then at the end of the vast court build a stupen- 
dous mosque, with five lofty Saracenic arches open- 
ing up its interior, all towering as high above 
the rest as Allah above the gods of the infidel. 
But, to make his divine supremacy sure, to proclaim 
it to sight for miles and miles around, rear on high 
the mighty Kutb Minar. Such a tower ! Can the 
round world equal it? It and Giotto's in Flor- 
ence are the two that utterly overpeer all others. 
Nearly fifty feet in its base diameter and rising to 



236 



INDIA 



the height of two hundred and forty feet, broken at 
intervals by five beautiful corbeled balconies, the 
first three stories of red sandstone and the two 
upper ones of white marble, its superb shaft pow- 
erfully incised with alternate angular and rounded 
flutings and decorated with bands of inscriptions, 
it excites the mind with such positive invigoration 
as to call out literal shouts of admiration. To have 
built it seems greater than to have stormed Delhi. 

Here are but passing glimpses of two of the 
ruined cities of these forty-five square miles of his- 
toric stones. Of Ferozabad and Indrapat I cannot 
stop to speak, vast and overwhelming as they are 
in their lonely and massive desolation. But the 
whole country around is strewn with ruins. Trav- 
elers speak of the profound impression left by the 
Appian Way of Rome ! The tomb of Cecilia Me- 
tella would go unnoticed here. There are miles of 
three-domed, mosque-like tombs in which it could 
be hidden away as a toy. Then, too, the exquisite 
beauty of many of them, burial-shrines of poets, 
saints, daughters of kings, with such pathetic in- 
scriptions as, for example, this : — 

" Save the green herb, place naught above my head : 
Such pall alone befits the lowly dead." 

Often they are of purest white marble, inclosed 
by snowy openwork screens, wrought in infinitely 
graceful carvings of vines and tendrils. 

All passes away, and naught remains. Pride 
and glory, they are dust and ashes. " A thousand 
years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is 
past, and as a watch in the night." How often 



DELHI 



237 



we prate this overpowering thought ! But not in 
Delhi. No ; here we feel it, know it, as everlast- 
ing yea and amen. The heart beats not in pulses 
of seconds, but in pulses of centuries. The mind 
is arrested not by the fleeting aspects of the hour, 
but is swayed by the flow and ebb of centuries. 
The very story of to-day, as we stand on the spot 
at Humayan's giant tomb, from which, in the 
Indian mutiny, brutal Hodson dragged out the 
last trembling descendants of Tamerlane, and shot 
them out of hand, — what was the thrice-repeated 
ring of that carbine but the thrice-repeated knell 
of the mighty Mogul dynasty ? The mob of infu- 
riated Mohammedans, with arms in their hands, 
that hung around the ruffian trooper and his hun- 
dred mounted men, and never dared to lift a hand 
while the last princes of their emperor's blood, pit- 
eously begging for their lives, were shot dead, — 
what a change from the days when their terrible 
ancestor had burst in like a cyclone from the north, 
sweeping everything before him ! To-day in its 
place stands Great Britain's imperial dynasty. It 
needs but to lift a finger, and from the Himalayas 
of the north to Tuticorin in the south its will is law. 
But has this fleeting show of power and pomp any 
more abiding root ? In Delhi one cannot believe 
it. Mournfully on every passing breeze sighs the 
strain, " Thou carriest them away as with a flood : 
they are as a sleep." 



VIII. 



j Fkom Delhi to Jeypore, the change was 
as great as from the solemn movement 
of Sir Thomas Browne's " Religio Medici " or of 
his chapters on Urn-Burial to a comic opera of 
Sullivan's. Stretched alongside a Jeypore street, 
Boston Public Garden in tulip-time would look 
gray and sombre. Such a feast of color in the 
red, orange, green, blue, white, gold dresses of 
the men, women, and children ! It was a perpet- 
ually revolving human kaleidoscope. One did not 
so much as have to turn it ; it turned itself. Even 
the elephants had caught the color infection. En- 
tirely apart from their splendid trappings, their 
heads and trunks were painted in charming ara- 
besques. Nor, considering the fact that an ele- 
phant is quite as much a colossal monument of 
architecture as he is a moving quadruped, did this 
decoration seem any more out of place than on the 
front of a temple. 

Then, too, how kind the people of Jeypore ! 
At least two splendid public wedding processions 
did they extemporize for our sole benefit. Oh, 
the contrast from crawling into a dozen black 
hacks, then closing the blinds, and driving to a 
roped-in church, as is the mournful marital custom 



JEYPORE 239 

in America ! No ; marriage was never intended 
for a selfish private affair between a sequestered 
man and woman. It should be celebrated out- 
doors in brilliant sunshine, and always with the 
accompaniment of elephants ! Without elephants 
what union can ever hope to prove permanently 
happy ! 

One of the processions we witnessed was of a 
promising little boy of eleven and a bride presum- 
ably of seven, though her we were not permitted 
to see. But as the boy husband had most likely 
scarcely set eyes on her himself, we could not, as 
total strangers, feel seriously aggrieved. It was 
a pleasant feature of the cortege that the invited 
guests were for the most part lovely children, in 
order, I take it, that the company might not be 
too grown-up for the miniature bridegroom. First, 
there came a huge scarlet-and-gold-caparisoned ele- 
phant, with a celestial troop of children high aloft 
in the howdah. Next succeeded carriage after car- 
riage filled with equally ravishing-looking children. 
Then mamma and her older daughters, with no- 
thing to detract from their Oriental beauty but the 
jewels in their noses, — worse misplaced there than 
jewels in the head of a toad, even though the Re- 
vised Version will insist that it was a nose-ring and 
not an ear-ring that Isaac bestowed on Rebecca in 
the effusion of his romantic love. Then a caval- 
cade of led horses, resplendent with cloths thick-set 
with gold or silver bosses, and on each horse the 
perfect picture of a little Oriental prince or prin- 
cess of from six to ten years old. What followed 



240 



INDIA 



next had some symbolical meaning which I did not 
understand. Two wiry, active men, in red from 
head to foot, kept leaping and slashing harmlessly 
at each other with long curved knives. Perhaps 
the occult idea was that evil would surely come 
should the happy couple ever draw on each other 
that sharpest of all edged knives — a railing tongue. 
But the boy husband himself ! Horse and he 
were all of shining gold, while long gold tassels 
hung down over his face, to hide, I suppose, his 
too tumultuous feelings. The rear was brought 
up by a troop of singing, dancing girls, literally 
with "rings on their fingers and bells on their 
toes; " while, to impart due solemnity to the close, 
a final elephant, grave as a judge on the bench, 
rolled ponderously along. 

Certainly, it was a bit sad to reflect that, should 
the pretty boy husband of eleven chance to die at 
the age of twelve, the poor little bride of eight 
could never remarry, but must end her days a de- 
spised, maltreated widow, at the mercy of a tyrant 
mother-in-law. While in America mothers-in-law 
are often found the tenderest and most self-sacrifi- 
cing of women, in India there is to the young widow 
no such name of terror. In many a case in by- 
gone days even Sati, or widow-burning, was not a 
leap out of the frying-pan into the fire, but out of 
fifty years of frying-pan, held over the coals by 
a remorseless mother-in-law, into flames that in- 
volved but ten minutes of agony, and all was stilled 
forever. 



AMBER 



241 



The Maharajah of Jeypore has the repu- 
tation of being very polite to strangers. 
Certainly he was to my friend and me, fairly 
overwhelming our sensibilities by sending a gi- 
gantic elephant to take us to Amber, a ruined 
city several miles away on the mountain side. 
No vulgar omnibus elephant for Tom, Dick, and 
Harry, this ! but the Oriental equivalent of a di- 
rector's private Pullman car all to ourselves, — 
we monarchs of all we surveyed, which seemed a 
quarter of an acre when we got on the animal's 
back. Then the' gracious condescension with which, 
on seeing how small we were, the lowly minded 
mammoth went down on all fours, and suffered a 
ladder to be placed against his side ! Many the 
carved relief I had seen on Hindu temples of a 
midget of a man apparently worshiping an ele- 
phant, but this absolute reversal of the scene in 
the worship of the midget by the elephant was a 
lesson in humility time will never dislodge. True, 
when he got up it felt for a moment earthquaky ; 
but can it rationally be expected that a two-story 
house, with a pillar at each corner for a leg, shall 
rise from its knees without somewhat discomposing 
the feelings of two quiet gentlemen in the second 
story ? 

It was a glorious ride the self -abnegating elephant 
gave us. Though he had been over the ground a 
hundred times himself, he knew it was all fresh to 
us, and never for a moment slighted the scenery by 
departure from the judicial dignity of his walk. 
Amber lies on a slope of the mountain side, its for- 



242 



INDIA 



tifications picturesquely rooted on a rocky base 
reflected in a lake below. There, from the days 
of Ptolemy, and how much farther back no man 
knows, had stood the capital of Jeypore, rich in 
multitudinous palaces and still more multitudinous 
temples and tombs, until in 1728 the site of the 
capital was removed six miles away to the level 
plain. The superb palaces of the Maharajah are 
still preserved in their former glory, while every- 
thing else has been suffered to fall into ruins. Any 
attempt to describe these palaces would be only 
to try to do again what was vainly tried for those 
in Agra. Enough that here again was the acme 
of the aesthetic Mohammedan paradise, a few short 
years of which one would think would suffice to 
reduce the Archangel Michael to a sensual imbe- 
cile. Cato himself, had he come to live here at 
eighty, would have become a warning to all young 
men before he had reached the age of eighty- 
four. 

The most impressive sight of all, however, was 
to look off from the level marble roofs of the 
palaces over the ruined city. Fifty Pompeiis 
could not leave an equal impression of majestic 
desolation. Ruins become, as a rule, the haunts 
of bats and owls. In India they become also the 
haunts of fakirs, — naked, covered with dirt, muti- 
lated with austerities, their matted hair hanging 
down to their loins. Extremes meet; and the 
natural reaction from the Mohammedan paradise 
is the brooding, self-torturing fakir, face to face 
with the emptiness, dust, and ashes of all earthly 



AMBER 



243 



glory. Here in Amber is before his eyes a per- 
petual sermon from the text, Sic transit, which the 
comment of the most eloquent preacher could only 
serve to weaken. 

Were I a fakir, I would live in Amber as surely 
as, had I been a sculptor in the palmy days of 
Greece, I would have gone to Athens. No scen- 
ery of earth, luxurious landscape, arid waste, wreck 
of by-gone glory, is ever deeply interpreted to the 
feeling apart from living presences, animal or hu- 
man. What vultures are to the Parsee burial- 
tower, or jackals to the ruined porticoes of Pal- 
myra, such are fakirs to an abandoned Indian 
city. Already had I become acquainted with, seen, 
handled, smelled, and explored with every sense 
the genuine fakir, — whole troops of them at once. 
In Cawnpore an intelligent missionary had given 
me free introduction to large groups of them, and 
furnished me in the flesh the most living commen- 
tary on the letters of St. Jerome I had ever read. 
Naked but for an iron chain around their loins, 
perpetually throwing dust over their grimy bodies, 
their hair like strands of tarry rope-yarn, half 
idiotic, stupefied with bhang to help on religious 
vision, — so melancholy a spectacle of mental de- 
gradation I never saw outside an insane asylum. 
And yet just such a spectacle as this — minus the 
bhang, I doubt not — was for many years, before he 
broke loose from asceticism, and before his interior 
illumination, the world-saviour, Sakya Muni, the 
Buddha of countless millions. Singularly enough, 
I saw at the same time a Christian convert, a man 



244 



INDIA 



of thirty, with wonderfully beautiful eyes and a 
radiant glow of love in his face, who had himself 
for many years been a fakir, and at last found his 
enlightenment under the sacred bho-tree of the re- 
ligion of Jesus. In two so utterly different worlds 
had he lived, and so vivid was his analysis of the 
mental states of each, that a long talk with him 
gave me more insight into the soul experiences 
of Sakya Muni than all the books I have ever 
read. 

The professional tramp in America and the pro- 
fessional tramp in India, the one secular, the other 
sacred, what a study in human nature to compare 
the two ! So unlike and yet so like ! Each, in 
sheer physical inertia, seeks Nirvana, the Nirvana 
of deliverance from the moil and strain of life ; the 
one to invite it with vagabond society, lewd stories, 
whiskey, tobacco, and stolen freight-car rides to 
sunny climes in winter and cooler ones in summer ; 
the other, in equal abnegation of every social duty, 
with opium-dreams, and vague reveries of a super- 
nally quietistic infinite, lapsed in immutable siesta. 
Each testifies alike to his pessimistic creed — the 
one reasoned, the other unreasoned — that this 
world of trouble exists but to be renounced. Yet 
the American type is despised, brutally arrested, 
and set to breaking stone for the highways, while 
the Hindu is venerated as having chosen the better 
part. Nothing can more forcibly emphasize the 
contrast between an industrial civilization like ours 
and a reverie-bound, supernaturally overpowered 
civilization like that of India. Yet of the two 



MT. ABU 



245 



tramp types, give me the Hindu ! From our own 
we can hope no Buddha. 

Ill -^rom J e yP ore we journeyed on to Mt. Abu, 
to visit there the famous J ain temples. The 
ride of seventeen miles from the station is by jin- 
rikisha, with six coolie power to propel the con- 
templative man inside. Not the "weeping phi- 
losopher " himself could have taken that ride 
without all along making the rocks ring with 
peals of laughter. Oh, the monkeys in the trees ! 
The blessing of Sancho Panza on him who first 
invented them ! A man of one language, said 
Goethe, is a man of no language. Equally, the 
man who has never seen the monkey but in a cage 
has never seen the monkey. As the rose is naught 
without its setting of green leaves and coruscat- 
ing dewdrops, so is the monkey naught without 
cliffs and trees to furnish him with spring-boards 
and natural flying trapezes for his splendid evolu- 
tions. 

The peculiar species that so kindly turned out 
to beguile with their antics the tedium of our 
ascent of the mountain were about three feet in 
height, ashen-gray in color, with a three-foot tail, 
white hair and beard, and a face as black as char- 
coal. To come suddenly on a group of a dozen 
or more of them, seated aloft on an acacia-tree 
eagerly eating the pods, and then to raise a shout, 
produces a scene that beggars all description. In 
an instant the whole tree is all a-quiver with the 
rattling pods, while one detachment of the mon- 



246 



INDIA 



keys scampers like mad to the tips of the branches 
and swings off in magnificent leaps of twenty or 
thirty feet to the branches of neighboring trees, 
and another makes headlong dives into the thick- 
ets below. The most diverting sight of all is to 
watch the mother monkeys, their little coal-black 
babies clinging by all four hands to the fur on the 
maternal stomach, thus leaving mamma free play 
of all her limbs for the execution of the most be- 
wildering leaps. For an emergency — say a house 
a-fire and a natural desire on the maternal part to 
grab up as many silver spoons as possible before 
taking flight — monkey babies understand better 
how to keep out of the way than the most highly 
evolved of human babies. 

I have introduced this monkey episode, and es- 
pecially the latter part of it, not in a spirit of tri- 
fling, but for its serious architectural and, I may 
add, theological bearing on the immediate object 
we have in view. We are ascending Mt. Abu to 
see and interpret the famous Jain temples there. 
In their infinite elaboration of carvings of figures, 
animal and human, they present what I might 
fitly call an opium or hasheesh delirium of sym- 
bolism. Nothing stands for what it is, from the 
wing of a butterfly to the trunk of an elephant, 
but ever and always as suggestion of some un- 
derlying mystic meaning. Fortunately, it had so 
happened that only a few days before I had been 
reading the record of a controversy which took 
place ages ago between two rival Hindu sects. 
It was on the world-old subject of grace and free- 



MT. ABU 



247 



will, so familiar to us all along from the days 
of St. Augustine. The Hindu champion of pure 
grace argued in a style that would have drawn 
applause from Jonathan Edwards. To man was 
allowed no single initiative in the work of his sal- 
vation : desire, will, act, all were outright work of 
God in him. What, however, was the crowning, 
triumphant illustration of the relation of the soul 
to Deity which the Hindu theologian employed? 
Precisely the one I had just been witnessing with 
my own eyes in the relation of the baby monkey 
to his mother. The baby monkey, he argued, sim- 
ply clings by an instinctive act of faith to his mo- 
ther, while she bears him safely over dizzy preci- 
pices, and rescues him from peril by flying leaps 
from tree to tree. But is not this clinging the in- 
dividual act of a free agent? the caviler might ask. 
No, responds the profounder theologian, it is all 
free grace. The mother eats for him, drinks for 
him, assimilates for him, and through her milk 
pours into him instinct, desire, strength. Cut off 
from this fountain-head, he would at once be re- 
solved into the nothingness of nothingness. The 
whole spectacle, went on the devout controversial- 
ist, is a piece of pure symbolism, enacted before 
man's eyes as he wanders in the woods, to reveal 
to him the interior relation of the soul to God. 
Would, then, the Occidental mind ever hope to 
penetrate into the inner shrine of Hindu mystic 
theology, at a glance it becomes clear how abso- 
lutely necessary it is to learn to take the monkey 
seriously ! 



248 



INDIA 



To all this, the ordinary cut-and-dried, totally 
unimaginative Yankee tourist is as blind as a bat. 
On entering a Hindu temple, the first carving 
that arrests his eye is, perhaps, precisely that of 
a mother monkey leaping across an abyss with 
her baby monkey tight a-hold of the hair of her 
stomach ; and forthwith he goes into fits of laugh- 
ter. A precious lot these Hindus, he says, to let a 
graceless scamp of a stone-carver cut such monkey- 
shines as this in the house of God! Little he 
dreams that in this monkey-shine, as he calls it, 
the devout Hindu beside him is adoring a most 
touching symbol of the free grace of God safely 
bearing the soul of man across the abyss of sin. 
The Yankee might argue that the Hindu was lack- 
ing in sense of humor. The Hindu would retort 
that the Yankee lived but on the surface, and was 
devoid of all deeper insight into the symbolic mean- 
ing of the All. 

Anyhow, I have used this long illustration sim- 
ply to strike the keynote as to the only way in 
which the Western mind can ever learn to inter- 
pret sympathetically a Hindu temple or to see in 
it anything other than a kind of menagerie sud- 
denly let loose by an earthquake. In their orna- 
mentation the Mt. Abu temples are, as I have 
said, a veritable hasheesh delirium of symbolism. 
Beautifully situated in a vast mountain crater, 
four thousand feet high at its level, and sur- 
rounded by picturesque mountains, they seem lit- 
erally out of the world. So they are, and so they 
always have been, only that for centuries on cen- 



MT. ABU 



249 



turies countless thousands of pilgrims have visited 
them. Dating back, the older of them to 1032 
A. D. and the newer to 1197, and constructed in 
their cloisters and shrines of white marble that 
now has the color of ivory, one marvels at their 
state of preservation. The older temples are sim- 
pler in their style, and so, to my eye, far more 
beautiful ; but in the newer is witnessed the per- 
sistent tendency of the Hindu to lose all simplicity 
of form in rampant symbolism. Just as in the for- 
ests of India when a noble tree falls, a stately col- 
umn in itself, it is forthwith buried out of recogni- 
tion in ferns, cactuses, orchids, and pepel vines, so 
has it been with the history of Hindu architecture. 
The cloisters here are set three-aisle deep with pil- 
lars ; and every pillar and every bay above and 
every doorway to the successive shrines are wrought 
with such a wilderness of figures that the world 
does not seem old enough to have allowed time to 
carve them. So with the pillars-set court-yard, so 
with the temple itself. The wildest hallucinations 
of fever dreams never take on such multitudinous 
and fantastic shapes. 

Truly, nowhere so much as in its architecture 
does the inmost spirit of a people so incarnate, so 
materialize itself. Even more than in a Hindu 
epic does the mind of Hindu India reveal itself in 
the temple. There it stands all at once before the 
eye, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, petrified — 
nay, rather, spiritually arrested — in stone. 

Is all this beautiful? Fantastic certainly, his- 
torically impressive certainly, ushering, as it does, 



250 



INDIA 



the mind into a realm thus arrested in stone, whose 
imagery never before coursed through a Western 
brain but in the delirium o£ fever. How simple to 
us looks the world, its genera and species of trees, 
birds, reptiles, and beasts dominated by our scien- 
tific categories and reduced to an order so easily 
and yet so shallowly grasped! Not a little boy 
with us who cannot resolve it all into mineral, 
vegetable, and animal. But to the Hindu what 
a mystery, what a phantasmagoria, what a cloud 
dissolution of form into form, what an all and no- 
thing, what a play of illusion where nothing is 
but what is not ! Thence, what a world of sym- 
bols from serpent and tiger, from ant and elephant, 
from fly and hawk, from burrowing mole and cliff- 
scaling goat, to express its multitudinous infinity ! 
Thence, what a bewilderment of deities to tell 
the story of the sources of all its terror and 
peace, its beauty and hideousness, its harvests and 
pestilences, its devastating passions and refuges of 
prayer ! 

Yet, it helps one to be plunged into the abysses 
of such a world. It awes and deepens him. It 
dissolves away the hard and fast outlines of the 
finite. Spite of the little of the symbolic enigma 
he can interpret, he feels in the presence of a uni- 
verse freighted with occult meaning, in contrast 
with which how literal and prosaic the world in 
which too habitually he dwells ! Still, here the 
whole process has been so deliriously overwrought ! 
Plainly in such wanton abnegation of all law of 
limit has the line of sanity been passed. Imagina- 



ARMED ABAB 



251 



tion has grown monomaniac. The muse of inspira- 
tion has been nurtured, not on nectar and ambrosia, 
but on hasheesh. As with all Hindu literature 
and philosophy, — an epoch in the life of every 
man when first he drinks the soma juice of its 
intoxication and is made to feel how no one can 
be truly sane till first he has become insane, — so 
equally is it with the purely Hindu architecture. 
Structure is buried out of sight by accessory, unity 
sacrificed to lawless multiplicity, the Pantheon 
transformed into the pandemonium. 

^ A great deal, however, is to be seen in In- 
dia of what may strictly be called Hindu 
architecture which is yet free from the reproach 
of the symbolic hallucination characteristic of the 
temples. But it is work done under the control of 
their earlier Mohammedan masters, men dominated 
by the severer and simpler taste of Semitic doc- 
trine and ideals. Under the Sultans of Gujarat, 
in Ahmedabad, — a city visited by few Europeans, 
but which for wealth of architectural beauty ranks 
certainly next to Agra and Delhi, — legions of 
Hindu architects and armies of native workmen 
were set to work in the construction of one of the 
most magnificent capitals in the world. But the 
hand of the Arab prophet was laid sternly on their 
shoulders. " Look ye ! no graven image or like- 
ness of any thing that is in heaven above or on 
earth beneath or in the waters underneath. Flow- 
ers, yes, and trailing vines, arabesques, graceful as 
ye can make them ! But idols none ! " 



252 



INDIA 



Historically impressive is it to see the law of one 
great ethnical faith thus laid in stern restriction on 
the deepest-seated instinct of another, and to note 
the architectural result. Cut off at a stroke from 
all his pandemonium of gods and devils, from all 
his tangled overgrowth of symbolic bats and owls, 
the genius of the Hindu architect achieved crea- 
tions of beauty that proved how his need of needs 
is the authoritative imposition of some sane law of 
reason and law of limit on the Saturnalia of im- 
agination. The buildings he erected for his Mo- 
hammedan masters are mainly tombs, mosques, and 
marvelous underground structures for the storage 
of water, structures acres in extent and built gal- 
lery on gallery of pillared stories. But how noble 
in construction, how exquisite in ornamentation ! 
As for the memorial tombs, such temples in them- 
selves, it would be peace in dying to think of being 
laid to rest in a scene of such tranquil, cheerful 
beauty. 

As one wanders around amidst all this architect- 
ural fascination in Ahmedabad, what a symbol is 
before the eyes both of the fate and of the deep- 
est-rooted need of this Hindu people ! It is the 
Hamlet of the nations, sicklied o'er with the pale 
cast of thought, yet so attractive, so profound, so 
pathetic in its incapacity for action. A thousand 
years before our era, the plummet of its thought 
had sounded the deepest abysses in the ocean of 
speculation, yet how impotent to-day to guide itself 
were it left alone ! Its Mohammedan rulers taught 
it many a lesson of practical administration and 



AHMEDABAD 



253 



regard for material realities, albeit they wrought 
such havoc with their rapacity and sensuality, and 
in degrading the former higher estate of woman 
laid the hand of pollution on the most sacred re- 
lation of society. Then, too, its Mohammedan fel- 
low-subjects set the example at least of a simpler 
faith and of a more practical and self-regulated 
life. But the two races mixed no more than oil 
and water. 

To-day England rules, and has brought to bear 
upon India the stupendous apparatus of Western 
thought and science. Railroads have been built 
and canals dug, manufactures established, famines 
largely stopped, population immensely increased. 
Hospitals have been founded, and schools and uni- 
versities endowed, all based on recognition of hu- 
man control of the unchanging laws of nature. 
Hundreds of thousands have been trained in the 
iron school of military discipline. The Hindu 
youth have flocked into the colleges, bringing their 
subtle intellectual acumen to deal with all the ques- 
tions of European literature, jurisprudence, phi- 
losophy, and science. Thus, no such range and 
depth of influence has ever been exerted before. 
Will it serve as a make-weight to the unbridled 
imagination of India ? Will it lead on to the most 
deep-seated of all the needed reforms of India, the 
education and elevation of woman ? Ah ! happy 
people, did they but know it, in being under the 
sway of the one nation of the world that can help 
them, an Aryan people like themselves, the first 
to recognize the depth and beauty of their highest 



254 INDIA 

achievement in literature, philosophy, theology, yet 
seeing with absolute clearness, and alone able to 
supply, just what as a nation they perish for the 
lack of. 



EGYPT 



I. 

^ As the ever-varying diorama of a journey 
around the world keeps unrolling itself 
before the eye, Goethe's saying, "Wouldst thou 
know the soul of a poet, visit the land of his 
birth," makes an increasingly vivid impression. 
So it proves with everything one had previously 
thought to get out of books alone. The first 
Oriental woman, prostrating herself and touching 
the ground before one with her forehead as in the 
presence of a superior being, teaches more history 
in a single sensation than can be learned from all 
John Stuart Mill's volume on the Subjection of 
Woman. The first experience of getting inextri- 
cably tied up in a network of trailing vines, with 
a general dank smell of orchids and a haunting 
suspicion of snakes and tigers, reveals more of the 
tropical jungle than all Wallace, Darwin, and 
Kipling have written. So with the feel of the 
swarming millions of Asia at one's first contact 
with Canton's river population or with the dense 
masses of pilgrims in Benares. 

Equally true does all this hold of the Desert, the 
indispensable mental preparation for getting in 
touch with Egypt. To know it, you must wade 



256 EGYPT 

knee-deep in its sand, be blinded with its glare, 
feel your cheeks tingle with the blowing silex 
grains, breathe sand, and grit it between your 
teeth. Then all at once you become intimately at 
home with the habitat of Abraham, Isaac, and Re- 
becca, of Moses and the Hebrews, of Mohammed 
and Ayesha, and last, but not least, of the camel, 
— all equally natural products of the desert, all as 
much indebted to it for their university training as 
are the patterns cut into our decanters and wine- 
glasses to the fiercely flying atoms of the sand-blast 
tool. For ages has the desert, with its cyclone- 
driven sands, been, in the hand of the Almighty, 
an irresistible historical etching - needle, cutting 
deep and persistent ideals and passionate faiths 
into the very brain substance of whole races. 

As far back as when he first sails into the savage 
jaws of the harbor of Aden on the southwestern 
extremity of Arabia, Egypt begins to stamp its 
first vital impression on the mind of the thoughtful 
traveler on his way by the Arabian Sea, the Red 
Sea, and the Suez Canal to that mysterious land. 
To the right and to the left of the entrance, 
divided only by a couple of miles of salt water, 
rise naked, fiercely rifted mountains, from one to 
two thousand feet in height. But every idea of 
verdure, seclusion, brook, and waterfall we are 
wont to associate with mountains is consumed in 
fire. Scorched, blasted, fairly writhing in the in- 
tolerable glare, they suggest the counterpart in 
nature of Dives in hell beseeching the poorest 
Lazarus of a beggar for a drop of water to cool his 



A SUN-SCORCHED LAND 257 



burning tongue. The very sands of the seashore, 
driven by the winds into the ravines, choking them 
up, and pursuing them aloft into their remotest 
windings, take on the mocking shape of descending 
glaciers, only glaciers of fiery sand. So literal is 
the resemblance that it is hard to dislodge the idea 
that the cruel deception was intended by malign 
Djins as a last refinement of torture. 

For a hundred miles from Aden, as one skirts 
the western coast of Arabia, he carries with him 
the same series of sun-scorched, desiccated moun- 
tain ranges, and he knows what lies behind them. 
There are here and there gorges in which a little 
moisture is collected, and a struggle for life main- 
tained by a few stunted shrubs. There are, be- 
sides, in part of the vast peninsula, comparatively 
fertile tracts, from which was derived the name 
Arabia Felix. But it takes very little in the way 
of verdure to make some people happy, particu- 
larly Arabians, habituated to a too monotonous 
strain of sun, sand, and calcareous hardpan. As 
is sometimes irreverentially said by rival religion- 
ists, u Your God is my devil," just in the same 
way might it be retorted by rival nationalities, 
" Your oasis is my desert." 

But, after all, what a place in which to 
breed a Semitic prophet ! All along I had 
felt Mohammed beginning to burn himself into 
my brain, as I imaged him hiding himself in these 
blasted mountains to have out the terrible wres- 
tle from which he emerged aflame with the faith, 



258 



EGYPT 



" There is one God ; and I, Mohammed, am his 
prophet." Day by day had he had the awful mon- 
otheistic sun to help burn in the thought of unity 
and resistless sovereignty. That Allah, at least, 
endured no rival near the throne ! A consuming 
fire, none could hide from his all-devouring eye. 
Terrible his wrath, as every withering grass-blade, 
every heat-riven rock attested. Nothing in all 
nature breathed a polytheistic word of nymph or 
triton. Submit, seek shelter under the shadow of 
a mighty rock, or meet annihilation ! 

All authorities in Oriental studies are now 
agreed that Mohammed derived his monotheistic 
idea from the Jews. But this was little. It was 
the consuming passion with which this son of the 
desert embraced it, — the irresistible iconoclastic 
will with which he made it one with the burning 
sands and flaming hearts of Arabia, in which lay 
the secret of his power. To what among such 
races would an abstract idea of unity amount ? To 
no more than an inert bullet or bombshell, without 
a magazine of explosives behind it to give it an- 
nihilating momentum. Mohammed, besides being 
a great unitary intellect, as demonstrated in his 
power to grasp and hold unshaken the simplicity 
of a thought as sublime and all-pervading in the 
religious world as gravitation in the physical, was, 
more than all, a man of volcanic energy of pas- 
sion. 

Why is it, somewhere says Emerson, that the 
reasoned conclusions of a mind like Plato's can 
never carry with them the same sense of authority 



ARABIA 



259 



that pierces in the shriek of an Arab prophet? 
As well ask why a breeze gently wafting over the 
cornfields of Indiana can never work the effect 
of a cyclone whirling the disintegrated atoms of 
the desert into gigantic sand-spouts, before whose 
fury all goes down in prostrate suffocation or in 
literal entombment under the billows of a sea of 
desert fire. Every little circling vortex of sand 
one sees waltzing across the desert is more than 
a symbol, is a literal illustration of the career of 
Mohammedan religious conquest. The hot sirocco 
breath breathed into the Bedouin by Mohammed, 
at once of faith in Allah and his moral law, and 
of lust, rapine, and annihilation of the infidel, finds 
its perfect physical counterpart before the eye. 

Mecca and Medina one does not see : first, be- 
cause he cannot, as they lie far inland ; and, second, 
because the ship now steers so far from shore that 
they would not be visible even if the sacred cities 
were thoughtful enough of tourists to stand directly 
on the coast. Still, it is a kind of historical com- 
fort to feel them in the neighborhood. It helps 
imagination. 

The first land sighted after quitting the more 
southerly coast of Arabia is, a day and a half later, 
the peninsula of Arabia Petrsea, among whose sun- 
scorched peaks lies Mt. Sinai. It looks just as fit 
a place to bring the desert to bear on another and 
vastly earlier Semitic prophet, with his chosen peo- 
ple, as that already spoken of. Let it be clearly 
understood that the desert means two things, — 
here arid, desolate mountain ranges, and there arid 



260 



EGYPT 



and desolate levels of sand and hardpan. Their 
one point of amity is that, as far as possible, no- 
thing shall grow on them. By this time the Red 
Sea is rapidly narrowing into the Gulf of Suez, 
and approximating the shores of Egypt and Ara- 
bia. To the east now stretch vast sand levels, while 
to the west runs the range of low mountains behind 
which lies the valley of the Nile. Then Suez is 
reached, and the ship enters the great canal shov- 
eled out of the thirsty sands ever ready to drift 
into it again and pack it solid, as the snows into a 
cut through which a railway runs. Here and there 
a few lakes offered spells of relief to the terrible 
digging. 

Before I had kept gazing eastward hour by 
hour, I could not have believed that mere 
stretches of sand could ever impart so indescrib- 
able an exhilaration ; yet I perfectly shared the 
enthusiasm of the poor old countrywoman who, on 
first being taken to the seashore, cried out how 
glad she was to see for once in her life something 
there was enough of. The smallest oasis would 
have been an intrusion. The rim of the horizon 
was just such a perfect circle as embraces the 
ocean. All was straw-colored sand-sea, with a blue 
dome a-top. But what is a sea without ships ? Ah ! 
the desert has its ships. "Ships of the desert" are 
the camels called ; and soon great convoys of them, 
heavily freighted to the sand-line, would heave into 
sight, never a clipper ship or fancy yacht built on 
more perfect lines for its especial work. 



THE DESERT 



261 



Camels in the desert are no intrusion. They 
simply enhance the sense of its loneliness and deso- 
lation. Gaunt, withered, silent-footed, a root out 
of the dry ground, with no form nor comeliness, 
they look as natural a product of its forces as 
Mohammed of old or a Mahdi of to-day. Simply 
blown together in a loose-jointed way by the winds 
creatively playing with the whirling sands, do they 
seem. You feel absolutely sure that they eat sand, 
drink sand ; that currents of sand circulate through 
their veins ; that, even when their baby camels 
suckle them, the queer, long-legged, knock-kneed 
little things only draw in a flow of sand, to them as 
nutritious as any other mother's milk. 

Now for the first time the full sense of the 
meaning of the desert masters the imagination. 
From far away eastward in Arabia to the thou- 
sands-of-miles-distant Atlantic coast of Africa to 
the west, it reigns, almost unbroken but by the 
long narrow oasis of the valley of the Nile. You 
feel the desert — I repeat it — like a vast ele- 
mental Dives-thirst in hell for a drop of water to 
cool its burning tongue. Does it lie in the physi- 
cal resources of the earth that any conceivable 
snow-crowned mountain ranges, . any deluges of 
tropical rains, should suffice to feed a river thirty- 
three hundred miles long, and to force it, a vast, 
fructifying tide, through a thousand miles of these 
gaping sands and stones, and yet so brimming 
over, three months in the year, as to lay under 
water the whole long, narrow valley and the ninety- 
mile-wide expanse of the delta? This is the stu- 



262 



EGYPT 



pendous feat of the Nile, which everyday at "High 
Nile " pours more than seven hundred thousand 
million cubic metres of water into the Mediterra- 
nean Sea, besides all that the parching soil has 
drunk to slake its thirst. To take all this in, it 
is infinitely more impressive to approach Egypt by 
the way of Aden in Arabia and the Red Sea than 
by the Mediterranean. First feel the desert, and 
then can you feel the Nile, — feel it physically, and 
feel it historically also. For, hot as is the thirst 
bred in its sands by the burning sun, hotter yet 
the passions of greed and envy to snatch from its 
lips the brimming cup that were bred in the sons 
of the desert, as they looked down from the bor- 
dering mountains of their scorpion fire-land on the 
luscious green of the wheat-fields and groves of 
date-palms of that miraculous oasis. 

^ The landing-place for passengers from India, 
via the Suez Canal, is Ismailia, about sixty 
miles northward from Suez itself. It is a little 
town that grew up as a depot during the cutting of 
the great canal ; and, as a small fresh-water canal 
was opened to the distant Nile to bring down a 
supply for the workmen, it furnishes to the novice 
an interesting exhibition, on a miniature Iscale, of 
the way of making the " desert blossom as the rose." 
Every tree makes one think of cattle driven to the 
river to drink, only that the trees do not budge and 
the river has to be driven to them. But drink they 
do, like trees " planted by the rivers of water, whose 
leaf also does not wither ; " and they prosper fairly 



ISM A ILIA 



263 



well. But a man does not journey from the tropical 
luxuriance of Boston Common to see little parks 
kept from dying of thirst in Ismailia. The grand 
attraction is the people, who are, perhaps, half 
Arabs and half Fellahin, or native Egyptians, with 
a small percentage of Turks. 

Among the Arabs, one sees in little Ismailia 
more magnificent-looking men in a day than he 
would see in New York in a year, if ever. The 
patriarch Abraham is met three times in every 
hundred yards, perfectly capable of entertaining 
the angels in his tent and then bowing them a gra- 
cious farewell with manners as celestial in dignity 
as their own. Such noble heads and fine-cut, 
bearded faces, such flowing robes, so superb a 
gait ! One wants to follow each one of them round 
all day, simply to keep looking at him. Infinite 
possibility of statesmen, warriors, or prophets does 
there seem in them ; and in comparison they make 
Europeans look cheap, fussy, and contemptible. 
To be able to maintain such manners on ten cents 
a day is to a foreigner a standing miracle. 

At the end of each street, however, shine the 
glowing sands of the desert; and an irresistible 
attraction leads one out to gaze over it again. 
There are found the wandering Bedouins, driving 
in their long trains of camels, forcing them to kneel 
down, and unloading them of their heavy burdens. 
How vividly are Old Testament and, later, Moham- 
medan scenes lighted up at every turn ! Rebecca ! 
She was no such bedizened princess as painters 
give us. She was just such a pretty camel-girl as 



264 



EGYPT 



you see before you, drawing water out of a well. 
Ayesha, Mohammed's young virgin love, after Ka- 
di j ah grew as old and wrinkled as the desert-aged 
women you see about you, — Ayesha, — why, there 
she stands by her camel ! She will smile on you 
quite bewitchingly out of her lustrous eyes, as you 
communicate with her by signs and gestures, — 
the only dialect of Arabic at your command, — yes, 
and alas ! will beg you for bakshish, whether an in- 
novation introduced into her circle of ideas since 
Mohammed wooed her my erudition is too scant to 
say. The thousand, the three thousand years of 
interval vanish ; and you are standing in the midst 
of identically similar scenery and personalities. Be 
sure, however, to keep a civil tongue in your head. 
Never lift a finger in menace against an Arab. He 
may be clad in rags, but a Chevalier Bayard is la- 
tent under them, who flashes fire like a flint struck 
by steel. 

y. How different with the Fellahin, — the pea- 
sant-class descendants, however mixed in 
blood, of the old Egyptians ! Significantly enough 
has Egypt been called the " Land of the Rod." 
" Spare the rod and spoil the child " nowhere else 
has received so stupendous an illustration. The 
rod, with backs to apply it to, built the Pyramids, 
dug the canals, collected the taxes, and to this day, 
though the English government is striving to abol- 
ish it, is taken as the natural and immutable order 
of things. To see a crowd of perhaps fifty natives 
surging down on a dozen or more tourists, each of 



THE LAND OF THE ROD 265 



the fifty yelling the merits of his donkey, and wild 
to have it taken, and then to watch the sight as 
two or three men leap from the boat and begin to 
belabor the poor devils with sticks, is certainly a 
novel and, to a free-born American, a painful 
sight. Right and left fall the resounding blows 
on heads and noses, and shoulders and loins, till 
your own skull and shoulders ache sympathetically. 
But not a particle of resistance is offered or the 
slightest sense of outrage manifested. A practical 
demonstration on such a scale of the results of the 
doctrine of non-resistance would excite every bel- 
ligerent propensity in the most placid Quaker to 
the bull-dog pitch. Holding a hand to his half- 
cracked crown or battered jaw, each, as he falls 
back, keeps on yelling the praises of his beast : 
" Him bully donkey ! Him General Grant don- 
key ! Him Mark Twain donkey ! " and, to empha- 
size the truth, a dozen of them are shoved pell-mell 
at you. To try to stretch your legs over one is to 
find two or three others thrust under you in a 
breath. Then another charge of the whackers, and 
a clearing is made sufficient to enable you to be- 
stride not more than a couple of donkeys at once ; 
and gradually you contrive so to contract your leg- 
compasses as to embrace but one. 

Yes, you understand now how the Pyramids 
were built ; and the whole atmosphere of Egypt in 
the past echoes with the reverberation of thwack ! 
whack ! on the muscles and bones of the poor 
wretches, whose works you, as an idle tourist, are 
going to see. It would be very interesting to read 



266 



EGYPT 



a statistical table, at the hands of some such com- 
petent Egyptologist as Mariette Pasha or Maspero, 
of how many thousands of cords of rods were used 
up on the bodies of the one hundred thousand 
workmen whom it took twenty years to build the 
one pyramid of Cheops. At the same time fresh 
light is thrown by the scene on the asperities of 
brick-making among the Bedouin Hebrews, who at 
last revolted and went out under Moses. Savory 
as were the leeks and onions of Egypt, one begins 
to understand how even the desert might present 
counterbalancing attractions. Broken heads and 
bones are bad, but a broken and abject manhood is 
worse. It was high time, if the world were to get 
any future Isaiahs out of the tribe, that the tonic 
of the desert should be brought to bear on it, 
where, disciplined by a predatory life of semi-star- 
vation, it should be got in train to fall like fam- 
ished wolves on the lands of the Canaanites. 

Well, here is a long way round to get to Egypt ; 
but often the longest way round is the shortest 
way home. I am but writing personal impressions ; 
and this is the manner in which the actual experi- 
ence impressed me. Just as one must be hot and 
thirsty before he can appreciate a delicious drink 
from a spring, so must he be hot and thirsty of the 
desert before he is sensitively ready for the brim- 
ming cup of Egypt. The desert and the Nile have 
been perpetually co-working factors in the evolu- 
tion of civilization, religion, art, conquest, and com- 
merce. 



II. 



j Feom Ismailia by rail it is a four hours' 
ride to Cairo. The only peril besetting the 
first part of the way grows out of a possible stam- 
pede of camels across the track in the van along 
its line. To this we personally were treated. Of 
course, to encounter the like phenomenon with 
cows, one does not need to leave America. But 
cows are commonplace, while derailment by a 
camel stirs the romantic element within the breast. 
Certainly, for stretch of legs and speed, when once 
headed straight down track, the performance of a 
herd of camels makes that of a herd of cows seem 
tame. In appeal to imagination, there can be no 
comparison. Such close approximation of the cam- 
els of Abraham and the locomotive of Stephenson 
is significant ; indeed, in its lively way, a symbolic 
parable on legs of the stampede of the Orient be- 
fore the Occident. 

A couple of hours and one is out of desert and 
semi-desert, plunged right into the heart of the 
land of Goshen. Oh, how green it looks ! Such 
leeks, such onions, such a growth of alfalfa clover, 
such beauty of the graceful date-palms, such pic- 
turesque-looking clusters of square flat-roofed mud 
huts, overhung with palms, — buildings so fascinat- 
ing to the artist, so Oriental to the tourist, and so 



268 



EGYPT 



fetid to live in ! As the train would stop for a 
while before one of these villages, a curious specta- 
cle was always at hand which might be of historic 
import. Indeed, what is the use of traveling if 
everything one sees does not take on historic di- 
mensions ? Well, the Egyptians have been called 
the most patient of peoples in the world. This pa- 
tience, does it root in their impassive nervous fibre, 
or is it the result of self-control? Certain it is 
that one sees no end of babies of six months, their 
faces thick with swarming flies, and each eye itself 
constantly run over by the legs of at least a dozen, 
who never so much as wink, much less lift a tiny 
hand to brush the pests away. Many the minister 
at home, a man of ascetic moral training and high 
spirituality, who is yet more carnally exercised, 
even in the full fervor of his discourse, by a sin- 
gle fly persistently disporting around the sensitive 
flanges of his nostrils, than are these little inno- 
cents by swarms of them. Under like aggravation, 
an American baby would make the welkin ring. 
The historic question, therefore, inevitably precipi- 
tated by such a nervous phenomenon is whether 
American babies, already so high-strung and rebel- 
lious at the age of six months, could ever develop 
into a race capable of building the Pyramids ? 

No, all this infantile example means something 
of the gravest import. Here is a race in which 
in certain directions the ordinary reflex action of 
the nervous system has shrunk to practical atro- 
phy. This child, in whom the legs of a fly cours- 
ing round his nostrils do not call out a reacting 



NILE HINTS 



269 



muscular twitch, is father of the man in whom 
a blow does not call out an answering blow, who 
will, without a finger lifted in resistance, suffer 
himself to be knocked down, kicked, and jumped 
on. Nothing perfectly analogous in the animal 
world is witnessed but in the conduct of the span- 
iel. Does this mean that if the odds are contin- 
uously and overwhelmingly against man or dog, 
the spirit at last succumbs, and even the physical 
instinct of nervous reaction dies of inanition ? 
Rod enough and flies enough, will the very nerves 
at last throw up the sponge ? Ah ! here lies the 
pathetic heartbreak of so much one sees in Egypt. 

I do not m6an to say anything about Cairo 
now, but first to go up the Nile, and pre- 
liminarily to throw out a hint or two that may 
prove of use. 

Until the accession of Thomas Cook & Son to 
the vacant throne of the Pharaohs of Egypt the 
old way of ascending the Nile was by small sail- 
vessels called "dahabiyehs." For fear of unguard- 
edly misspelling them, I shall henceforth call them 
simply boats; but in this individual instance the 
spelling can be relied on as abreast with the latest 
scholarship in Arabic English. These boats re- 
quired a party of eight or ten to share expenses, 
and, moreover, a whole winter at one's disposal to 
meet delays. It was undoubtedly the ideal way of 
seeing the Nile. Finally, however, Pharaoh Cook 
built a fleet of steamers ; and by these almost all 
people travel to-day. The passengers on board 



270 



EGYPT 



form what is called a "personally conducted party." 
They have their own dragoman, who provides don- 
keys, routs donkey boys, and gives imperfect expla- 
nations of hieroglyphical and mythological myste- 
ries that might baffle the untutored mind. 

The day was when the thought of ever becom- 
ing a member of a "personally conducted party" 
would have made me shudder from sea to sea. 
Had I not too often been startled in the Vatican by 
the sudden, noisy irruption of the Cook barbarians, 
heard the regulation hand-clap from the leader 
for silence, and then listened to his inane routine 
remarks as he personally conducted his victims 
round from statue to statue ? Had I not equally 
reveled in the blessed stillness that followed when, 
the short-lived tumult over, I was left alone once 
more to the serene Olympian companionship of 
Juno, Minerva, Apollo, and Zeus ? And now 
should I actually live to become a Cookite myself, 
and that, too, in Egypt ? No ! by Isis and Osiris ! 
by jackal-headed Anubis and ram-skulled Kneph ! 
No ! by sun-crowned Ea ! 

Well, I want to take a great deal of this frankly 
back, — at least in so far as Egypt is concerned. 
There are uninteresting reaches in the river which 
the steamer carries one quickly by. Meanwhile 
on board there are the satisfactions of excellent 
fare, clean beds, attentive service, and perfect hon- 
esty of treatment, while among so many passen- 
gers one makes sure of agreeable companionship. 
Of course one sighs that he cannot have Egypt 
more to himself. Still, driven to sufficient desper- 



NILE HINTS 



271 



ation, man is rich in individual resources toward 
securing peace and quietness. On long excursions 
one may urge his donkey far ahead of the madding 
crowd, or imaginatively afflict him with such spavin 
as to serve as a pretext for mercifully keeping him 
in the rear. One may learn to spot and shun the 
various types of bores, as, in especial, the man 
whose sole interest in visiting Egyptian temj)les is 
to distinguish the cartouches, or seals, of the dif- 
ferent kings, and who, for all the glorious architec- 
ture, would be quite as well off at home with a stick 
of sealing-wax, a candle, and a collection of authen- 
ticated scarabsei dies to stamp with. 

Still, for the quietly ruminating man who yearns 
to have his temple to himself, the device of devices 
to study is how to keep out of sight and sound 
of the dragoman and his rabble Comus rout who 
want to have their minds improved. Providen- 
tially, the enormous size of the temples renders this 
quite feasible. The dragoman, as a general rule, 
is an Egyptian of very imperfect French or Eng- 
lish articulation. He has scraped a purely busi- 
ness acquaintance with Isis, Anubis & Co., and 
thinks he knows them by their trade-marks. Old 
Egyptian mythology, however, is dreadfully con- 
fused. The numberless gods, goddesses, cults, 
and symbolic signs crossed, invaded, and annexed 
one another in a way that, in comparison, would 
make the genealogical tables of the Hohenstauffen 
and Hapsburg emperors easy reading. Indeed, 
often would it seem, on visiting a fresh temple, 
as though Amen-Ra, Horus, Kneph, Nit, Thoth, 



272 



EGYPT 



and the rest had been startled out of a deep sleep 
by the footsteps of the party, and, suddenly seizing 
and putting on, higgledy-piggledy, one another's 
crocodile's, cat's, ram's, or hawk's heads, had jumped 
up and plastered themselves against the walls, so 
as all to get into plausible shape to confound our 
erudition. In the long, narrow passages, however, 
of the underground tombs, these resources fail. 
There is, then, nothing for it but to be as patient 
under suffering as an Egyptian baby beset by a 
swarm of buzzing flies. Calmer hours of reflection 
will come later, in which memories of all you have 
seen there will emerge beautiful as reborn dragon- 
flies that have sloughed off and left behind their 
rent and desiccated Cook strait-jackets. 

^ The departure from Cairo for one's voyage 
up the Nile presents for the first two or three 
hours a succession of fascinating pictures. The 
city itself, crowned by the great citadel of Sala- 
din, and at its summit by the five-domed mosque 
of Mohammed-Ali, with its two slender, sky-pier- 
cing minarets, smiles a gracious good-by and God 
speed for a voyage of wonders. Into the very city 
thrusts itself a great arm of the desert; and out 
from stretches of straw-colored sand rise, like ex- 
halations, the ruins of the beautiful tombs of the 
Khalifs, to me the most charming of all the archi- 
tectural glories of Cairo. In color the stone of 
which their walls and domes are built differs little 
from the unbroken sands around them, imparting, 
as one sees them in the quivering glow of the sun- 



THE GIZEH PYRAMIDS 



273 



shine, the sense, not to be reasoned with, that the 
desert genii have built them out of sand and gra- 
ciously shaping winds, as with us the like sem- 
blance of temples is created of snowdrifts and win- 
ter storms. Further, from all quarters of the city 
rise at a hundred points the fanciful minarets of 
the Mohammedan mosques. 

Past the palaces of the Khedive and past the 
long, narrow island of Roda, with its Nilometer and 
the traditional spot where Moses was found in the 
bulrushes, one follows the great curves of the river 
till the enormous pyramids of Gizeh rise up in 
naked distinctness from the desert. 

Already had my friend and I visited these from 
Cairo and climbed Cheops. It is an instructive 
thing to do once ; but I defy any one, even with 
the steadiest head against dizziness, to get any 
emotional pleasure, any sense of the lapse of the 
ages, anything but execration of the present, out 
of it. Each climber is obliged by law to take with 
him three Bedouins, — two to pull, and one to 
push. From start to finish it is one unintermitting 
yell for bakshish. With this they keep on tearing 
the ears of their victims. Personally, I had but 
two emotions, — the one that the old Egyptians 
were the most intolerable stair -builders in the 
world, the other that, were I on the jury, I would 
vote to acquit on the spot any tourist who had 
killed his Bedouins. Mine, strict justice forces me 
to admit, had one, perhaps exceptional, linguistic 
accomplishment. They had been taught by some 
misguided American (Allah reward him according 



274 



EGYPT 



to his works!) to sing the tune and words of "Yan- 
kee Doodle ; " and, perforce, must I, two thirds up 
the pyramid of Cheops, join hands with these yell- 
ing Ishmaelites, and dance and sing this most triv- 
ial of all national anthems. Anything for peace ! 
And so I did it, with a lingering sense of shame 
that " forty centuries were looking down " upon 
my caperings. Indeed, time which heals so many 
wounds, has never had the least effect in mitigat- 
ing the exasperation of that climb of Cheops. It 
would have been such bliss to lie off half the day 
and muse. The blind, fierce pertinacity of flies 
settling on a festering sore was the only fit symbol 
of these human flies so fiercely preying on a fester- 
ing spirit. If only I could come to look back hu- 
morously on the scene ! But I cannot. Never 
does it revive in memory but I feel murder in my 
heart. 

And yet, I repeat it, it is a good thing once and 
forever to have gone through this purgatory, — to 
use the milder word. A cairn of gigantic blocks 
of stone, covering at the base over thirteen acres, 
and rising to a height of nearly five hundred feet, 
built solid moreover, with the exception of a few 
narrow passages, from skin to core, is certainly the 
most stupendous feat of the wrestle of mind with 
brute matter the round world can show. Further- 
more, as psychologists assure us, the role played by 
the muscular sense in all adequate appreciation of 
phenomena of weight is indispensable as a mental 
standard. Therefore, given a solid stone staircase, 
with risers averaging four to five feet, and a twenty- 



THE GIZEH PYRAMIDS 



275 



eight-inch stretch of legs to surmount them with, 
and, before one is up three hundred and fifty feet, 
he has developed into a self-conscious derrick and 
apparatus of blocks and hawsers that will thence- 
forth enable him to weigh to a hair every colossal 
column or architrave he later on encounters in 
Egypt. The moment his eye lights on one, the 
consciousness will revive of just how many tons 
of matter and emotion it physically and mentally 
stands for, and the sense of awe will expand pro- 
portionally. 

Seen, however, from the river, as one now sees 
the Gizeh pyramids in his voyage up the Nile, all 
one's old associations of reverence and mystery 
come back again. One is at rest and in peace. 
No Bedouin yell lacerates his ears, and the Hotspur 
in his blood is no longer " stung with pismires." 
Around these mighty cairns and behind them is the 
awful desert, and at their feet the Sphinx, time- 
worn and broken with her century-long brooding 
over the mystery of existence. Anywhere else but 
thus set in the naked simplicity of the desert they 
would lose their great effect. For they are not 
beautiful or sublime in the sense that a Greek or 
an Egyptian temple is beautiful or sublime. There 
is not range and variety enough of thought in their 
creation ; no thought, indeed, unless of enduring 
construction that shall defy war and earthquake 
and outdate time. 

One does not, therefore, in the least wonder 
that so many scientific minds of a speculative cast 
have written elaborate books, such as " Our Inheri- 



276 



EGYPT 



tance in the Great Pyramid, 95 to prove that these 
vast structures were built for purely geometrical 
and astronomical purposes, and stood for the inde- 
structible standards of the old Egyptian metric 
system instead of being built as the Gibraltars of 
a single royal mummy. There to all ages they 
stand foursquare, a terrestrial apotheosis of the 
immutable axioms of geometry, colossal memorial 
tributes reared as to the mind of Euclid. Rever- 
entially, and not lightly, does it seem as though 
the hieroglyphic inscription on them ought to rec- 
ord that superb demonstration, "The square of 
the hypothenuse is equal to the sum of the squares 
of the other two sides." So enduring a feat of 
reason, was it not far worthier of embodiment in 
an everlasting pyramid than the memory of any 
battle? 

In the mind of the non-mathematical tourist, 
however, such nineteenth -century heresy as this 
does not linger long. Rather, he broods over the 
long, deep sleep of King Khufu in his silent in- 
most chamber ; over the drone of the priestly 
masses that for more than two thousand years were 
still kept up for the repose of his soul ; over the 
impressive material-spiritual faith that incarnated 
itself in such enormous structures ; over the hun- 
dred thousand slaves who for twenty years were 
under the lash, quarrying and upheaving these gi- 
gantic blocks to make sure that after life's fitful 
fever one fellow-mortal should sleep well ; over 
the successive dynasties — Egyptian, Hyksos, As- 
syrian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Saracen, Turkish, 



MEMPHIS 



277 



French, English — that have risen and perished 
like successive waves beneath a sea cliff at the 
base of these indestructible monuments. Yes, as 
one broods and broods, he gets back again the Pyr- 
amids of his early awe, — immutable standards, in- 
deed, of measurement, — not, however, of the boun- 
daries of farm lands nor of the bulk of granary 
stores of wheat, but of the epochs of human his- 
tory. Up to their summits he gazes through the 
eyes of Khufu and Abraham, and Rameses, and 
Moses, and Cambyses, and Herodotus, and Alex- 
ander the Great, and Plato, and wanton Cleopatra, 
and Saladin, and Napoleon. The last trace of the 
discord of the yelling Bedouins lapses silently out 
of his mind ; and he thanks God that in its place 
has succeeded the solemnizing pendulum-beat " For- 
ever, Never ! " of what seems the sidereal clock of 
the universe. 

^ An hour or two past the Gizeh Pyramids, 
and the boat stops at Sakkarah. " Now 
comes my fit again ! " Of course, the bank is 
black as a crow-roost with braying donkeys and 
screaming donkey boys. Sic itur ad astro, in 
Egypt, and as well might a dying dog hope to 
expostulate with the awaiting buzzards. So let 
this once for all suffice. You fight your way 
through the surging mob of arms, shoulders, hoofs, 
and tails, and, somehow or other, find yourself 
astride a beast. In the interim of waiting one 
frantic Egyptian is thrusting a scarabaeus under 
your nose, another a mummy's foot, and so on and 



278 



EGYPT 



on till you are appealed to with the individual at- 
tractions of freshly manufactured antiques enough 
to set up a pseudo-Bulak museum. 

At last you get away ; and, as on this special 
occasion there were about eighteen miles to ride, 
with stops for refreshment only at tombs, the pace 
adopted was severe. Still, it proved exciting till 
gradually it was brought home, by seeing friend 
after friend take a header, how little the Egyptian 
donkey has made of his " Inheritance in the Great 
Pyramid" in the way of standing foursquare on 
his base. Mine own especial donkey, Rameses II., 
while on the full tear, came down in a pile, with 
an abruptness that shot me over his head in a 
splendid parabolic curve that might have brained 
me but for the buffer of my inch-thick cork hel- 
met. 

As soon as possible, however, after getting away 
one must do his best — it is the only hope in Egypt 
— to retire into the depths of his inner conscious- 
ness, and there wall himself in as tight as old 
King Khufu in his Gizeh Pyramid. Much in the 
way of saving wear and tear of spirit can thus be 
achieved. Even as in a siege the mother with her 
babe can learn to sleep sound under a cannonade, 
and awaken only when the little one begins to fret 
for milk, so in Egypt itself can a well-disciplined 
mind learn to abandon itself to day-dreams under 
a fusillade of bakshish, and yet be all on the spot 
the moment an appeal is made to its tenderer his- 
torical or architectural emotions. 

At first the way led along canal embankments 



MEMPHIS 



279 



and through fields of the richest garden culture, 
while beyond lay the shining calcareous cliffs and 
hot shifting sands of the desert, — the contrast of 
never-failing interest to the traveler in Egypt. 

An hour or more and we were now on the site 
of Memphis, on the site and on nothing else. 
Not a trace remains of this once splendid metrop- 
olis, founded, so runs tradition, by Menes, the 
first recorded Egyptian king, and, even so late as 
the day when Herodotus visited it, still the most 
magnificent city in the kingdom. Sovereign after 
sovereign enlarged and beautified it with temples, 
groves, lakes, colossal statues, and tombs ; while 
within its vast necropolis, stretching over a region 
of forty-five miles, lay all the seventy pyramids of 
Egypt, from Abu Roash on the north to Medum on 
the south. But to-day, over the ground on which 
stood this luxurious capital, one rides through un- 
broken fields of wheat and barley and maize and 
onions to the edge of the desert, and finds as me- 
morials of all this glory of the past but two muti- 
lated colossal statues of Rameses II., now prone on 
their backs, but nearly fifty feet in height when 
they stood erect. 

We had come, however, not to look at cornfields 
growing where once stood a mighty city, but to 
ride on into the desert to visit the scene of desola- 
tion presented by the ruins of the eleven pyramids 
of the Sakkarah plateau, among them the Step 
Pyramid, built not in triangular shape, but in three 
great stages. It is the oldest of all the pyramids, 
its present height from the base about one hun- 



280 



EGYPT 



dred and ninety-seven feet. What a wilderness of 
ruins ! " The abomination of desolation," — here, 
of a truth, it is revealed ! In many a land the fall 
to destruction of a great monument is but a signal 
to loving and bountiful nature for beautiful trees 
to root in its ruins and for birds to sing among 
their branches, for mosses and ferns to drape its 
flanks, for bluebells and columbines to nod their 
graceful flowers from its cornices. But in the des- 
ert to fall in ruins is the fate of the caravan dying 
of thirst in the burning sands. Bare, bleached 
bones are the only record. Around or on top of 
these gigantic ruins not a grass-blade grows, not a 
dry root out of the ground lifts a withered head ; 
and the solemn burial service to read over all is, 
not " dust to dust, ashes to ashes," but " desert to 
desert, sand to sand." 

It was the custom of the Egyptians to found the 
necropolis always in the desert behind the city, and 
never upon the fertile plain, as with our own beau- 
tiful cemeteries. Two main reasons determined 
this, — to get above the reach of the inundations 
of the Nile, and to secure in the cliffs the hard 
rock strata into which to cut chambers and gal- 
leries. Still another reason was security against 
body-snatchers, a form of robbery infinitely more 
tempting in a land where untold wealth of gold 
and jewels was often buried with the dead than in 
a land where no other use could be made of the 
mortal booty than to sell it to the doctors. Over 
thousands, however, of these rock-cut tombs have 
the winds of a hundred centuries swept the sands, 



KNIGHT-ERRA NTS OF THE SHOVEL 281 



till every trace of their site is lost. Thus what 
has been unveiled in Egypt is as nothing to what 
still lies buried. Beneath the sands over which 
one rides are endless cities of tombs forever hid- 
den, — cities that, while Memphis itself hardly bal- 
anced deaths by births, doubled generation by gen- 
eration their own ghostly population, still dreamily 
living on in mansions more spacious and costly 
than ever tenanted by those in the sunshine above. 
One sighs for the boon Harriet Martineau craved 
of some mighty god, to be made Boreas, with cy- 
clones at command, to sweep away these sands. 
The boon was never granted. What was accorded 
was bestowed on a humbler, but more heroic, class 
of patient toilers. 

To the patient digging of brave archaeolo- 
gists do we owe almost all our knowledge 
of the ancient glories of Egypt. They alone lifted 
the veil from the face of this mysterious Isis. 
Truly, of all the forms of modern heroism few are 
more worthy of applause than the patience, the 
courage in facing greedy ferocity and peril of life, 
the stern endurance of loneliness, privation, and 
the furnace of fiery heat displayed — no ! hidden 
— summer and winter, year in, year out, by num- 
bers of these devoted men. Foremost of all was 
the Frenchman, Mariette. Never knight of old 
more chivalrous and indomitable in rescuing from 
enchanted castle the imprisoned maiden there than 
he in delivering from the dungeon of the engulfing 
sands the pride and glory of the Egypt of old that 



282 



EGYPT 



had been the torch-bearer of civilization to the be- 
nighted nations of the world. 

In the course of the ride over the toilsome sands 
one comes to the lonely house where for so many 
years this knight-errant of the desert had lived. 
Close by it are his two great discoveries in this 
region, — the Serapeum, or Apis Mausoleum, and 
the Tomb of Thi. How he divined them hidden 
beneath the sand is a story it would be pleasant to 
tell did space permit. But divine where they were 
he did, and then, with his army of laborers, pain- 
fully dug them out, the wind oftentimes undoing in 
a night what it had taken a month to effect. To 
our modern minds, in which the rooted tendency of 
by-gone ages to identify symbol and reality as in- 
separably one no longer exists, it seems irreveren- 
tial to have to translate so high-sounding a title 
as "Apis Mausoleum" into u Memphian Westmin- 
ster Abbey for Departed Bulls." Such, however, 
not in plain prose, but in national veneration, it 
really was ! The bull, sacred to the god Apis, was 
to the initiated priests a symbol of power ; to the 
ignorant multitude, a divine incarnation in horns, 
hide, and hoofs. u He dwelt," says Rawlinson, "in 
a temple of his own near the city, had his train of 
attendant priests, his harem of cows, his meals of 
the choicest food, his grooms and curry-combers, 
his chamberlains who made his bed, his cup-bearers 
who brought him water, and on fixed days was led 
in a festive procession through the main streets of 
the town, that the inhabitants might come forth to 
make obeisance. When he died, he was carefully 



KNIGHT-ERRA NTS OF THE SHOVEL 283 



embalmed and deposited, together with magnificent 
jewels, statuettes, and vases, in a polished granite 
sarcophagus cut out of a single block and weighing 
between sixty and seventy tons. The cost of an 
Apis funeral amounted sometimes, as we are told, 
to as much as £20,000 sterling." 

While we of to-day may smile at all this, it 
would have been grim earnest had any one in the 
old Memphian times looked superiorly askance at 
this bovine divinity, this incarnation of the god on 
earth. Thirty centuries later a Roman soldier was 
torn in pieces by a mob for accidentally killing a 
cat sacred to some other deity. Indeed, the most 
sanguinary fights were always occurring between 
rival townships, the one of which deified the croco- 
dile, and the other of which despised the crocodile 
and exalted the snake. Very curious was it — in- 
deed involving a mental wrench in the attempt to 
get into sympathy with the feelings of one's fellow- 
creatures of five thousand years ago that put sore 
strain on the imagination — to thread the great un- 
derground passages in which, at wide intervals, had 
been deposited twenty-four sarcophagi containing 
the mummified bodies of these venerated animals. 
What magnificent monuments of stone-work they 
were ! — ten feet long, nine high, seven broad, and 
a foot thick, each made out of a single block of 
granite brought from five hundred miles away, cov- 
ered by devout inscriptions, and all broken open 
by sacrilegious thieves. But the whole outside cir- 
cuit of the Serapeum, dug out so painfully by Ma- 
riette, with its propylon, its crouching lions, its 



284 



EGYPT 



avenue of sphinxes, is now, alas ! sanded up once 
more. Poor Keats in his despair wrote for his 
own epitaph, " Here lies one whose name was writ 
in water ! " What a dry wit commentary on this, 
these shifting sands effacing all record of the he- 
roic toil of poor Mariette ! 

As devoted to the earthly and eternal in- 
terests of a human being, the Tomb of Thi, 
next visited, naturally took stronger hold on sym- 
pathies rife in all hearts to-day than a tomb for 
deified bulls. Truly, the world offers few more 
impressive experiences than to be riding over an 
expanse of barren sand-hills, and then, suddenly, to 
come upon a vast excavation, to descend its incline 
to the portal once on a level with the whole city of 
the dead, and then to find one's self ushered into the 
pictured interior of an Egyptian mortuary home. 
"The Egyptians," says Diodorus, "call their houses 
hostelries, on account of the short period during 
which they inhabit them ; but they call their tombs 
eternal dwelling-places." 

Profoundly one feels this as he wanders through 
the silent chambers, gazes on the infinitely varied 
scenes depicted on the walls, and tries to get into 
touch with a fellow-mortal, who, though he died 
five thousand years ago, seems so on hand to wel- 
come one to his abiding home. Yes, the home feel- 
ing of the Egyptian tomb ! With us in America, 
let a man become rich, his first desire is to build 
himself a fine house above ground and straightway 
make it a miscellaneous museum of Persian rugs, 



THE TOMB OF THI 



285 



Japanese bronzes, carved Indian furniture, and 
Sevres china. Not so with the Egyptian. He 
spent his life in a plain house, and concentrated 
all his wealth, taste, and feeling for domestic com- 
fort on his tomb, experiencing as palpable zest in 
fitting it up as in England or America a wealthy 
young fellow in arranging to his mind his snug- 
gery, with its store of embroidered slippers and 
smoking-caps, of Turkish pipes and Havana cigars, 
of vellum-bound books, crested writing-paper, and 
Italian pictures. In just such spirit did the wealthy 
Egyptian spend half his lifetime, with an army of 
quarrymen, statuaries, and decorative artists under 
his command, in getting his tomb exactly suited to 
his taste. I use the word taste advisedly, for in 
the disposition of this tomb provision was made 
for every comfort, every idiosyncrasy even of body 
and mind. Further, while with us the bitter pang 
to the rich man is that no sooner may he have got 
ensconced in his costly mansion than death will 
tear him away, the Egyptian counted securely on 
at least three thousand years of undisturbed ten- 
ancy. 

As one wanders through the chambers of his 
"eternal dwelling-place," and thinks of the keen 
satisfaction the genial man must have taken in 
watching, year by year, the progress of the work, 
one fairly envies Thi. He had been poor, had 
attained wealth and high rank, till finally he had 
married into the royal family. But when riches 
increased, he did not set his heart on them in any 
but a supramundane sense. His, the solid, home- 



286 



EGYPT 



spun Egyptian way of interpreting the text, " Lay 
not up for yourself treasures upon earth, where 
moth and rust do corrupt and thieves break through 
and steal." Such perennial dryness of desert situ- 
ation he secured that no rust nor mould could in- 
vade ; and as for his treasures, were they not laid 
up thick, and earthquake proof, in his tomb, where 
his ghostly double and their ghostly double — the 
real and enduring essence of them both — would live 
on face to face. How pleasant to contemplate the 
pictures of these treasures on the walls, as Thi, his 
wife, and sons are expatiating over their delights ! 
Here he is watching his servants bringing in on 
their shoulders sacks of grain or fattening his 
fowls by thrusting pellets of meal down their 
throats. Here he is inspecting his geese and 
ducks swimming on a pond. Here he is overlook- 
ing his Nile boats laden with jars of wine and bales 
of goods. " Cows are crossing a ford, and cattle 
browse in the meadows. Oxen are ploughing, the 
seed is sown, the corn is reaped. Donkeys are 
brought up with much fuss and use of the stick, 
to carry away the sheaves to the farm-yard. Some 
of the scenes are drawn with inimitable humor." 

Yes, Thi would have his laugh as well as his 
solid comfort in his "eternal dwelling-place." The 
days had not yet come, as under the later empire, 
when terrible pictures were portrayed on the walls 
of tombs of the purgatories and hells of torment 
through which the soul might have to pass. All 
was happy trust that the best of life but prefigured 
the best of after life. Alone or forgotten he would 



THE TOMB OF THI 



287 



not be. To his enduring mansion would come his 
children, and his children's children, to feast in the 
festival hall, and make him sympathetically enjoy 
along with them, though after his own disembodied 
fashion, the flavor and smell of the spiritual dou- 
bles of the roasts they were consuming in their 
ovine or bovine original. 

In this naive way of portraying the tangible sat- 
isfactions of the life to come there is, it must be 
confessed, something very winsome. It made me 
think of Rev. John W. Chadwick's poem, " Climb- 
ing the Mountain," where the weary footfarer, 
yearning for the vision of what shall be revealed 
on the other side, at last reaches the top, only to 
find the scene unrolled as homelike and sweet as 
that he had left behind. Far more of a prosaic 
photographer and less of a spiritual poet than Mr. 
Chadwick, the Egyptian, but each equally human 
in his faith. Ah! who but has felt a thousand 
times that here in the beauty and affections of 
earth are all the elements of the most beatific 
vision of heaven, and that, if we could but keep 
our dear ones tight-locked in our arms, with death 
at bay and God close by, — could but go on cheer- 
ing, illuming, and crowning with blessings one an- 
other's days, — we could dream no fonder para- 
dise? 



III. 



j. The characteristics of the scenery of the 
Nile can be more easily realized from pho- 
tographs than those of any other river in the 
world, so simple is the Nile in its outlines and 
so continuously the same from day to day. Beau- 
tiful the river cannot be called in the sense in 
which the Rhine and Hudson are beautiful. There 
are no forest-clad mountains, no rolling hills, no 
charm of variety afforded by pretty villages or 
spire-tipped cities. A comparatively narrow sel- 
vage of cultivation along the banks — a selvage 
sometimes a few yards and sometimes a few miles 
wide — is shut in on either hand by barren, sun- 
scorched hills of limestone or by stretches of des- 
ert sand. The shapes of these denuded hills or 
semi-mountains are often very picturesque, and at 
times abut on the river's edge in noble cliffs, pitted 
all along their lines of harder stratification with 
entrances to cave tombs, just as with us similar 
cliffs are pitted with holes into swallows' nests. The 
flora is the most limited conceivable. It consists 
almost exclusively of mimosas, sycamore-figs, and 
date-palms. With the rising or setting sun be- 
hind their feathery tops, silhouetting them darkly 
against a rosy or opalescent sky, these palms are 
singularly beautiful. Indeed, everything in Egypt 



CHARACTERISTICS OF NILE SCENERY 289 



silhouettes marvelously. A train of camels, with 
their upward-curving necks, horizontal heads, and 
long, gaunt legs, reminds one irresistibly of the 
picture Coleridge draws in the "Ancient Mariner" 
of the sun raking through the ribs of the phantom 
ship. Ever on the air is the sound of the creak- 
ing levers of the shadufs by which, standing tier 
above tier, the natives lift from the falling river 
the irrigating water. And yet, spite of this con- 
stant monotony, a voyage on the Nile is singularly 
fascinating. The air is sweet and invigorating. 
The barren hills take on such varied colors under 
the morning and evening lights as to transfig- 
ure their arid reality into a fairy-land of aerial 
mirage. 

It would prove only tedious to the reader to at- 
tempt to drag him round from tomb to tomb, from 
temple to temple. A glance at a map of the Nile 
will give the sites, and a brief study of any illus- 
trated books on Egypt the pictures, carvings, and 
statues, as no pen can hope to reproduce them. All 
that the ordinary tourist can hope to do is to en- 
liven the scene with some vividness of personal 
impression, and to throw here and there a ray of in- 
terpreting light on what looks so strange and gro- 
tesque in pictured illustrations of the monuments 
of Egypt. Indeed, the trouble with most callow 
travelers in Egypt, even with the objects before 
their eyes, is that they get lost in such a wilder- 
ness of details that they " cannot see the woods for 
the trees." So exhaustive a knowledge do they 
struggle after of just how many gums, spices, na- 



290 



EGYPT 



tron baths, amulets, sacred extracts, wrappings of 
linen, and canvas went to the embalming of a sin- 
gle mummy as to leave no brains for raising the 
preliminary question of why the mummy ever was 
embalmed at all. With a competent outfit, per- 
haps, for the position of an Egyptian undertaker, 
they yet lack the first requisites for that of a ten- 
tative historical or theological observer. 

^ In the description given in the last chapter 
of Thi's tomb at Memphis allusion was 
made to the Egyptian doctrine of the double. 
Now just as surely as in Dr. Edward E. Hale's in- 
structive story, " My Double and How He Undid 
Me," its unhappy writer was brought to grief by 
not fully taking in the exact nature of his own 
double, so equally will every embryo student of 
early Egyptian conceptions of spirit-life find him- 
self " undone " if he does not take in the exact 
nature of the Egyptian's double. The double is 
fundamental, as much a part of the man and his 
belongings as are his own or their own shadows in 
the sunshine. 

The religion of the earlier days of far-away 
Egypt was the most literally materialized system 
of pantheistic animism the world ever saw. Such 
a thing is there as a poetic system of pantheism 
that sees and feels Deity in high and beautiful 
things, — in sky, mountains, lakes, noble and be- 
neficent human lives, — but which finds itself dis- 
inclined to indulge in the same devout emotions 
over chairs, tables, brooms, crocodiles, snakes, and 



PANTHEISTIC ANIMISM 291 



cats, — rather is secretly disposed to the belief 
that, somehow or other, the devil had a hand in 
them. This higher poetic system of pantheism 
believes, indeed, in the body as the tabernacle of 
soul, especially when body takes the shape of the 
luminous eyes of a beautiful woman or of the 
broad, meditative brow of a sage, but feels little 
spiritual interest in such organs as the liver, spleen, 
and pancreas, — indeed, is inclined to think, very 
much as Emerson put it, that we could get on just 
as well without them. If it dreams of continued 
existence beyond the earthly life, this same poetic 
system of pantheism yearns for such existence in 
an etherealized shape, — in a state, indeed, in which 
there shall be no more vulgar buying and selling ; 
no more marketing for fish, flesh, and vegetables ; 
no more pew-rents for spiritual consolation ; no 
more doctors nor apothecary shops. And yet, in 
the higher realm, it would retain Beulah moun- 
tains and lakes, music beyond that of Beethoven 
and Mozart, inspirers rapt in the visions of an Isa- 
iah, or a St. John at Patmos ; for these things seem 
all divine. 

Not at all in this sublimated way, however, do 
the more ancient Egyptians appear to have felt. 
In the mass they were the most prosaically im- 
aginative people conceivable, shut up to celestial 
yearnings for a sort of everlasting Dutch tulip 
garden and a pipe beside a canal. For the ade- 
quate enjoyment of this they wanted the body, 
and the whole of it, — hair, nails, skin, viscera ; 
for each of these had its double who, if they did 



292 



EGYPT 



not keep a sharp lookout, would be sure to undo 
them. Therefore, no endearing little cherubs for 
them, amputated just below the shoulders ! 

I must be permitted the use of very plain lan- 
guage or give up any attempt at being faithful to 
fact. In truth, it is failure to resort to plain lan- 
guage and plain corresponding ideas that makes 
so much that is written about this land of marvel 
hazy and unreal. An Egyptian's tomb was indeed 
his spirit house, but, as any one can see with half 
an eye, a house in which his spirit needed his ap- 
petite, his bed, his three meals a day, his ser- 
vants, his farm and kitchen-garden, his bath, his 
cat and dog, even his doctor and his pills. All 
these he could enjoy in a strange spiritual-material 
way, for every one of these objects, even a carved 
or painted figure of one of them, possessed or was 
possessed by its corresponding double. Thus, a 
chair that could be sat on by a living man weigh- 
ing two hundred pounds had its phantasmal double 
that could be sat on by a spirit weighing nothing, 
each in his own especial way. Thus, a savory roast 
of flesh, that could be inhaled with gusto by re- 
sponsive material nostrils, could in its double be 
inhaled by spiritual nostrils ; indeed, the meat it- 
self or its etherealized Liebig extract equally well 
masticated and digested by material or by spirit- 
ual teeth and alimentary canals. But teeth and 
alimentary canals of either kind there must be, or 
a spirit would find himself as ill provided in his 
tomb as a solid man in the flesh at his dinner-table. 
Without realizing all this to our minds, after the 



PANTHEISTIC ANIMISM 293 



most literal and downright fashion, we shall make 
no step of headway in getting into touch with the 
vast tomb-world environing us. It is the old Egyp- 
tian we are talking about, not about ourselves. 
Where we smile, he was in dead earnest. 

Now for the first time are we in position to un- 
derstand why, in the Egypt of old, such enormous 
sums were lavished on the fitting up of tombs, such 
costly and elaborate processes of embalming re- 
sorted to, such endless galleries painted with wall 
pictures of all conceivable objects, the double of 
each one of which stood in immediate relation with 
the convenience or luxury of the double of the oc- 
cupant himself, at last settled in his "eternal dwell- 
ing-place." Just as literally as any one of us would 
feel utterly nonplussed and miserable on returning 
to his home in New York or Boston to find there 
no chairs, no carpets, no cups and saucers, no meat 
in the larder, no family to greet him, no books to 
read, no Bridget in the kitchen, exactly in the same 
way did the old Egyptian spirit feel about his 
tomb. In wrath and exasperation would he haunt 
and make unendurable the lives of the son or 
daughter or wife who had subjected him to such in- 
tolerable privations. And while the minute and 
commonplace fidelity to details with which all this 
was believed in and carried out often strikes our 
minds in an irresistibly humorous light, to an 
Egyptian it was a matter of such serious import, 
that any neglect of it would have set his spirit as 
much beside itself as the temper of the average 
American householder, who, on returning of a cold 



294 



EGYPT 



night to his home, should find just such a carpet- 
less, bed-less, meat-less scene of distraction as was 
but now alluded to. 

"A fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind," and 
of what use is historic imagination unless it can 
be raised to a vivid enough pitch to enable one to 
" put himself in the place " of a justly aggrieved 
fellow-creature of five thousand years ago? But 
when all went well, and wife and son were tender 
and loyal, what comfort and satisfaction in the 
dear home-tomb ! Truly life is sweet, and a plea- 
sant thing is it to behold the sun. There the sun 
still shone, the harvests waved, the birds sailed 
through the skies, and the fishes leaped in the 
Nile. Alas ! for the man who has not learned to 
live into the heart of, to join in the wealth of, the 
spiritual double in all things. Teach us, O Egyp- 
tians, teach us the profundity of thy love ! 

Ill ^ er y different is the impression made by the 
tombs of the later dynasties. The priest- 
hood has become a gigantic hierarchical power; 
and the change in the pictorial emblems on the 
walls is as marked as in Europe between the earlier 
spiritual conceptions of the Gospels and the em- 
bodiment of all mediaeval theology in the Hell, 
Purgatory, and Paradise of Dante. The body is 
still embalmed, the tomb is still the double's home, 
offerings are still made, and the old, familiar every- 
day scenes are on the walls. No outright break 
has been made with old ideas ; and they live on 
in juxtaposition, no matter how incongruous with 



LATER TOMBS 



295 



one another. But the whole scale of proportion is 
tipped the other way. The sense of personal ac- 
countability for the life on earth is now the pre- 
ponderating feeling. The gods have assumed more 
definite attributes. The forty-two judges at the 
awful day demand each his categorical answer as 
to sins of lying, stealing, adultery, bearing false 
witness. In the presence of the gods the heart is 
weighed against a feather, emblem of truth and 
right, that under no gust of passion must swerve a 
hair. Thoth, the righteous judge, writes down the 
record and passes sentence ; while Anubis watches 
the indicator of the balance, and behind him stands 
a devouring monster in waiting to seize upon the 
wicked. The judgment over, here a soul is changed 
into a hog for its sensuality, here is torn to pieces 
by the "Devourer," here is led into the blessed 
presence of Osiris. 

Such, in million-fold forms, are the scenes now 
presented, as one threads the long passages and 
comes out into the pillared halls of tombs extend- 
ing, perhaps, five hundred feet into the solid rock. 
The figures are carved or stamped in low relief, 
and colored. So incalculable their number, even in 
the few burial-places that have been opened, that 
one feels as though the entire population of Egypt 
must have been engrossed in this one work, with 
no time left for sowing or reaping. And yet the 
marvelous thing to think of is, that all this Dres- 
den or Munich gallery, finally completed by its 
army of artists and artisans, was thenceforth never 
further to be beheld by any human eye. Perils to 



296 



EGYPT 



the dead have increased. Strength of masonry can 
no longer be trusted to, and concealment must be 
the hope. The mummy once deposited, the en- 
trance was stoned up, the cliff broken down, and 
every possible trace of the whereabouts of the 
tomb destroyed. There were no more reception- 
rooms or festal halls. The days of the former 
pleasant, social intercourse between the dead and 
the living had gone, and the simple supramundane 
had passed over into the supernatural. Amenti, 
the heaven of the departed, now lay in remote re- 
gions in the west, across the Libyan Desert. 

Now, in perfect sincerity, what is the inevitable 
impression made on a reflective mind of to-day by 
these pictorial representations of death, arraign- 
ment before the last tribunal, judgment, penalty, 
introduction to the blessed abode of Osiris ? It is 
and it must be the strangest conceivable admixture 
of the pathetic and sublime with the grotesque and 
ludicrous. The first entrance is inevitably solem- 
nizing. You pass in under the brow of the great 
cliff. You thread rock-hewn passages and halls, 
with the oppressive sense, so usual in caves, of the 
weight of the superincumbent mountain. It is 
pitch dark, and you light your way with a candle 
held up close to the pictures to examine them. 
Every now and then leaps out the flash of a bit of 
burning magnesium wire. Rembrandtesque effects 
of whitest light contrasted with blackest shadow 
reveal in sharp distinctness long stretches of pic- 
tared wall and ceiling. The great theme perpetu- 
ally present with every one who, heir to the sense 



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297 



of moral accountability, yet trusts in a final beati- 
fic vision of God, is the theme before the eyes, as, 
thousands of years ago, it engrossed the minds and 
hearts of myriads of one's fellow-creatures. More 
solemnizing thoughts, in their spiritual import, 
than those that underlie these pictorial representa- 
tions cannot be entertained by the human mind. 
They are, as I said but now, the recognition of an 
immutable moral law before which Pharaoh and 
peasant alike must bow, and which here is seen 
administered without fear or favor by divinities, 
each one of whom is an incarnation of some aspect 
of immutable law. He must be a brute, and not a 
man, who does not feel a sense of awe in such an 
Egyptian tomb. But now to turn to the other side 
of the appeal made to mind and feeling. 

"Thou art weighed in the balance, and found 
wanting." How sublime and moving this judg- 
ment, as it falls from the lips of a Hebrew prophet 
over a once mighty king! We can understand 
how a Washington Allston burned his life to ashes 
in his vain struggle to give satisfying expression 
to it on his canvas. But how, in contrast, did the 
old Egyptian portray the scene of weighing the 
value of a human heart? He presented it in a pic- 
ture of a horizontal balance, such as was daily used 
in the market for weighing grain or swine, with a 
vase with a heart in it on the one platform, and on 
the other an upright feather. The god Anubis, 
who is touching the indicator with the tip of his 
finger, — through what eyes is he reading the mo- 
mentous record? Through the eyes of a jackal, 



298 



EGYPT 



set in the head of a long-eared jackal. Thoth, the 
righteous judge of the great cycle of the gods, who 
is writing down on a tablet the result of the judg- 
ment, — there he stands, peering over his tablet 
with the head and long bill of an ibis. Horus, a 
man-headed bird who conducts the soul to the awful 
bar of judgment, is himself a hawk-headed Mer- 
cury. Osiris, the beatific vision of whom is finally 
granted as the highest bliss of the soul, who would 
ever want to see him, — a swathed and bandaged 
mummy, with the crown of Upper Egypt a-top ? 
Ah ! what a remove from Shakespeare's " What a 
piece of work is a man ! how noble in reason ! how 
infinite in faculty ! in form and moving how ex- 
press and admirable ! in action how like an angel ! 
in apprehension how like a god ! " 

Such a motley masquerade of animal-headed di- 
vinities interferes sadly, it must be confessed, with 
the due seriousness of mind with which one would 
contemplate such awful subjects. Of course, one 
knows that these animal substitutes for the regal 
crown of the body in which reason is supposed to 
be enthroned are to be taken symbolically. But 
there are symbols and symbols. To the modern 
man who has lost all vital touch with these, the 
pictures so parody the solemn theme as to suggest 
the final judgment-day of jackals and hippopotami. 
The incongruity puts too severe a strain on the 
average mind to leave it duly impressed with such 
supernatural reasoners on " temperance, righteous- 
ness, and judgment to come," and so makes the in- 
terest largely archaeological. And yet these hawk 



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299 



and jackal headed divinities go so seriously about 
their business, and seem so naively unconscious of 
how queer they look to us, that by degrees their 
earnestness communicates itself to the feelings, till 
the picture becomes, in a way, affecting. One's 
own mind grows Egyptianized. It helps, too, to- 
ward feeling with solemnity what these pictured 
scenes meant to those who of old looked on them, 
to read translations of the hieroglyphics written 
above and beside them. These contain most touch- 
ing prayers, records of just and righteous judg- 
ments, summaries of the whole duty of man as 
bound up in the command to do justly, love mercy, 
and walk humbly with God. Still, in setting down 
honestly the strangely contrasting impressions sure 
to be made on the spectator, it must be clearly un- 
derstood that one has first to accustom himself to 
seeing, for example, Amen-Ra, the highest divinity 
of Egypt, the one of whom, through whom, and 
to whom are all things, presented in the guise of 
a naked man, a necklace on his breast, bracelets 
on his arms, anklets on his legs, and a high feather 
in his cap, and, that done, to reconcile, as best he 
can, the picture with so sublime an invocation as 
that of the following hymn : — 

11 Hail to thee, Lord God of law, 
Thee whose shrine none ever saw ! 



Forms to all the men that be, 
Color and variety, 
By his fiat are assigned. 
Unto him the poor men cry, 
And he helps them in distress. 
Kind of heart is he to all 



300 



EGYPT 



Who upon him called, 
God Almighty to deliver 
Him that is afraid and meek 
From the great ones who oppress, 
Judging ever 

' Twixt the strong and weak." 

Many superior people at home who have de- 
rived their whole idea of Egyptian religion and of 
Egyptian conceptions of the realms beyond from 
the most spiritual passages in the " Book of the 
Dead," or from the profoundest comments of 
Herodotus, Plato, and Plutarch, will perhaps be 
shocked at expressions one has to use in simply 
reporting what his own eyes see. After rising in 
an exalted frame of mind from reading Plutarch's 
" Isis and Osiris," such natures do not like to hear 
that among the mighty dead of the Del-el-Bahara 
cavern-tombs on the lonely Libyan hills, it was 
found, for example, that Queen Uast-em-Khebit 
was laid away to rest fully fitted out for the resur- 
rection morn with a supply of curled and frizzled 
wigs. Not, indeed, that curled and frizzled wigs 
are much more incongruous with so triumphant 
an occasion than, religiously speaking, are analo- 
gous displays of head-gear that with us flower out 
on Easter Sunday, or that we are especially war- 
ranted in throwing stones at our poor mummy 
sisters for feeling the ruling passion strong in 
death! Only in Egypt, with such a background 
of the ages, and when one has seen the individual 
royal mummy that did it such aeons since, the 
levity strikes home in a more solemnizing, per- 



LATER TOMBS 



301 



haps a more pathetic way, bringing out in us the 
Hamlet feeling over poor Yorick's skull : " Now 
get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her 
paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come ; 
make her laugh at that ! " 

Yes, Egypt is the land of contrasts. Not for a 
moment can the thoughtful man forget that he 
stands on a soil w r here the initiated and elect could 
declare of absolute Deity, " He is not graven in 
marble. He is not beheld. His abode is not 
known. No shrine is found with painted figures 
of him. There is no building that can contain 
him. . . . His commencement is from the begin- 
ning. He doth not manifest his forms. Vain are 
all representations." Then, in contrast, as the 
visitor opens his eyes and looks about him, lo ! 
this wilderness of representations largely in what 
are to us the most repulsive animal shapes ; this 
nation of priestly undertakers reducing to a lucra- 
tive trade the whole business of supplying the de- 
parting spirits with circumstantial, extramundane 
Baedekers, in which every inch of the sorely beset 
way to the heaven of Osiris is mapped out, with 
specific directions as to just what amount of bak- 
shish is enough for this or that obstructing fiend, 
and just what fulsome ceremonial titles will please 
the ear and secure the favor of this or that celestial 
protector. 

Again and again has Eobert Browning given 
eloquent expression to his conviction that if the 
glorious hope of immortality were degraded from 
a sublime trust of the higher instincts of the soul 



302 



EGYPT 



into a dead-level sense-demonstration of external 
fact, it would remove all that is most uplifting and 
purifying. Too often, in Egypt, would he have felt 
this conviction reinforced with the weary weight of 
all the colossal stones piled on top of the material- 
ized dogma. Excess of contact with its dusty prose 
and dreary literalism would, I am sure, have broken 
the wings of the spiritually soaring poet, till never 
there could he have hailed his own arisen one in 
the strain, — 

" My lyric love, half angel and half bird ! " 

So far I have spoken but of pyramids and 
tombs ; while it is among the ruins of the 
great temples of Abydos, Denderah, Edf u, Luxor, 
Karnak, Philse, that the mind is bowed under the 
overpowering sense of the colossal and fairly super- 
human genius of the Egypt of the past. Again 
and again one shrinks at the thought of attempt- 
ing to say anything about these temples, and goes 
on to something else. Indeed, what can one say ? 
There are certain sensations we are wont to call 
elemental, so massive are they, so overwhelming, 
so submerged in the very substance of feeling 
never to be defined or analyzed. The ocean, the 
Himalayas, the Book of Job, the "Fifth Sym- 
phony," Rembrandt's " Night Watch," awaken in 
us this elemental sense. Always in the effect pro- 
duced there is involved the overpowering weight of 
material mass ; here, in a Beethoven as in a press- 
ure as of seven atmospheres of sound ; here, in 
a Rembrandt as in the tangible presence of vast 



THE TEMPLES OF EGYPT 303 



realms through which is enacting the colossal strug- 
gle of light with darkness. It is the sense of thus 
dealing with the elemental that stirs up from the 
foundation the oceanic depths in genius, and fur- 
nishes shaping substance for its stupendous con- 
ceptions. For a more fitting expression, then, of 
what this meant to the Egyptian of the far past, 
I know not better where to turn than to the words 
of one who, thousands of years ago, thus recorded 
his own feeling on being led into the awful pres- 
ence of the Pharaoh : " I w T as as one brought out 
of the dark. My tongue was dumb, my lips failed 
me, my heart was no longer in my body to know 
whether I was alive or dead." 

" The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wis- 
dom," said the deep heart of the Hebrew race. 
Without the sense of overwhelming awe, the sense 
of nothingness, how shall the poor conceit of man 
be humbled in the dust ? Yet, there is the pros- 
tration of the cowering slave ; and there is the 
prostration of the saint or prophet hushed in ad- 
oration, and with no words on his lips but " Not 
unto me ! " Never in any other temples reared 
by the hand of man do mind and heart so feel 
this sense of the finite overwhelmed by the in- 
finite, in naked, dominating simplicity, as in the 
Egyptian. It is all there in the sublimest Gothic 
cathedrals ; but it is there blent with beauty, up- 
lifted by triumphant soaring, and glorified with 
rainbow hues of vision. In Egypt it stands out 
alone. 

What a tiny ant crawling along the base of a 



304 



EGYPT 



mountain does a man feel himself as he enters a 
temple like Luxor ! Colossal statues forty feet in 
height, seated in the immortal calm of ages, con- 
front him with their awful silence till his own finite 
griefs and petty ambitions dwindle to the insig- 
nificant trifles of an hour. He walks along ave- 
nues of columns so enormous in mass and height 
that the overthrow of one of them would crush 
an army of such insects as himself ; and yet all 
around him they lie, fallen, fallen, fallen. His 
thought is dealing with dynasties so remote, em- 
bodied in royal shapes so colossal and in memo- 
rial temples so stupendous, as to seem the record 
of a story that shall never perish. And yet, in the 
presence of eternity, nay, of time itself, what are 
they to be likened unto but the dust blown from 
the balance. It is, then, this sense of prostration 
beneath what at first seems utterly incommensura- 
ble with the grasp of the human mind that consti- 
tutes the " fear of the Lord which is the beginning 
of wisdom" in the appreciation of an Egyptian 
temple. Not that it continues a slavish fear. 
No ! " He that humbleth himself shall be ex- 
alted," and at last the exaltation comes. For is 
it not witness of a spirit that has within itself the 
keynote of vibration in harmony with all this 
immensity, that man can finally so surmount the 
sense of prostrate awe as to feel in all this mighty 
Presence but a symbol of his own eternity ? Luxor 
and Karnak ! in such a presence the most average 
mind is lifted into a realm in which it seems native 
to think and feel in the strain of a Pascal : " Man 



THE TEMPLES OF EGYPT 305 



is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but lie is a 
thinking reed. It is not necessary that the entire 
universe arm itself to crush him. A breath of air, 
a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But were 
the universe to crush him, man would still be more 
noble than that which kills him, because he knows 
that he dies, while the universe knows nothing of 
the power it has over him." 

The first great Egyptian temple visited on the 
way up the Nile is that of Denderah. In the ap- 
proach to it one encounters what is the perpetual 
marvel of the Egypt now revealed to-day. Here is 
a vast structure that for ages was buried up from 
sight. The winds of the desert blew in the sands. 
Generation after generation of men built up their 
habitations of clay about it, till the walls were 
hidden ; and then generation after generation plas- 
tered their mud huts, foul as crows' nests, over the 
gigantic blocks of the roofs. Now all is cleared 
away from within and without; and you thank 
God for the sands of the desert and the potsherds 
of the peasants, as the actual angels' wings that 
sheltered these priceless treasures against the van- 
dalism of nature and man. Fresh cut as of yester- 
day come out the carvings. 

This is not the place to describe the shape and 
arrangement of the Egyptian temple. Familiarity 
with these must be gained from engravings and 
photographs. One does not, as a general rule, 
enter their porticoes as he does the open porticoes 
of Greek temples. A screen is built up half-way 
high between the outer columns, all the way along 



306 



EGYPT 



the front, except between the two of them that 
open up the entrance. They thus subserve the 
end of portico-halls rather than of porticoes, — 
a feature greatly enhancing their impressiveness 
through the stupendous effects of light and dark- 
ness. One enters. Physically and literally, the 
breathing is arrested and the heart almost stops its 
beating. Such a forest of gigantic columns, such 
a Druid grove in stone, such mysterious depths in 
the roofing overhead and in the vista of the halls 
opening out beyond ! There are those who would 
call this the feeling of the barbarian. Then glo- 
riously confess the barbarian's love of prostration 
beneath an overpowering sensation. Boldly say 
that in comparison with the effect wrought by 
such a portico-hall as that of Denderah, the effect 
of any such famous portico as that of the Pan- 
theon in Rome is but as that of a pretty cluster 
of birch saplings to a California grove of giant 
redwoods. When in the forest a group of tree- 
trunks takes your breath away, when it awes you 
with the sense of thousands of years of growth, 
when you have to look up and up to cope with its 
majestic branching overhead, when you behold its 
mighty base in brilliant sunshine, and its dome 
overhead a vault of darkness and mystery, then 
first you get the sublime of what may fitly be 
called elemental arboreal sensation. This awful 
secret in stone the Egyptians knew as none that 
have ever lived before or since. 

All through the course of human history man 
bears witness to the fact how keenly he suffers in 



THE TEMPLES OF EGYPT 307 



presence of the overwhelming powers about him, 
through the sense of physical littleness and limi- 
tation. Against this he struggles with straining 
heart. His arm is puny; and, to supplement it, 
he invents levers and cranes. His eye is feeble ; 
and, to give it range, he thinks out the telescope. 
His voice is weak and monotonous ; and, to impart 
to it resonance and variety, he compasses the trum- 
pet, the drum, the organ, the violin. Then he 
rises into freedom. Mind no longer dominated 
by brute matter, every force in matter becomes 
an attribute of mind. This freedom the Egyptians 
achieved through Titan power of handling enor- 
mous masses, and shaping them into a Titanic 
world. Their Pharaoh ! A block of granite fifty 
feet in height, twenty to thirty in length and 
breadth, and weighing a thousand tons, alone could 
serve for the statue that should give adequate ex- 
pression to the weight of his authority, the immov- 
able foundation of his reign. For what did he 
stand to them ? For a god upon earth. " Thou 
art like the sun in all that thou doest. Shouldst 
thou wish to make it day during the night, it is so 
forthwith. If thou sayest to the water, 4 Come 
from the rock,' it will come in a torrent sud- 
denly, at the word of thy mouth. The god Ra is 
like thee in his limbs, the god Khepra in creative 
force." Therefore, when, in the Book of Exodus, 
the God of the Hebrews hardens Pharaoh's heart, 
it is that He may " show his power," even over so 
awful a being, and " get glory of him." All this 
awe and prostration before the Pharaoh's might 



308 



EGYPT 



the Egyptian temple bodies forth. The Egyptians, 
too, hardened the heart of the rock, and made it 
brute, sullen, and rebellious, that they might show 
their power over it, and compel it to reveal their 
glory. 

And how the rock does reveal their glory! 
This is the dominating feeling, as one wanders 
among the ruins of their temples, with at first a 
feeling of dazed, prostrate awe, and at last a feel- 
ing of exultation. The builders will touch no 
stone that would not leave other builders aghast 
at the bare thought of moving it. They roof with 
slabs thirty feet long, seven wide, and four thick, 
as we would roof with slates. Each column, each 
capital, each architrave, each ceiling, carries with 
it the sense of fear and trembling crowned with 
triumph. Our very ignorance of the means em- 
ployed adds the feeling of supernatural mystery, 
till the giant colossi, seated immovable on their 
thrones, seem but images in their natural size of 
the sole beings who could rear such structures. 
And yet, withal, how is all tempered with beauty ! 

A few trivial figures sometimes help the mind 
as scales of relative proportion, though personally, 
I must confess, I have never felt profoundly in- 
debted to the tape measure for more impressive 
estimates of the sublime. Still, to try the experi- 
ment on a single feature of one of the stupendous 
columns in the "Great Hall" of Karnak! It is 
computed that on top of one of the lotus-leaved 
capitals of these columns one hundred and fifty 
to two hundred men could stand. Well, in imagi- 



THE TEMPLES OF EGYPT 309 



nation set the dwarfed creatures up there like a 
swarm of flies, and stand off for a look at them. 
How maliciously would Dean Swift have reveled 
in the sight, delectable as anything he devised in 
Brobdingnag ! With what a sardonic smile would 
he have doffed his shovel hat in deferential con- 
tempt to the little midgets ! And yet in the very 
act of degrading he would but have exalted them. 
The midgets built the stupendous temple. 

In this single hall there are twelve of these 
massive columns, each thirty-six feet in circumfer- 
ence and eighty feet in height, forming a central 
avenue, and, on either side, one hundred and 
twenty-two of only less gigantic dimensions dis- 
tributed in aisles of seven, — one hundred and 
thirty-four columns in all. Atoms of the dust, did 
you rear this ! Matter ! it is the stuff of man's 
dreams as truly as of God's dreams, and mind a 
power compelling its brute mass as the winds the 
clouds. Orpheus singing into place the stones of 
the sacred city with the music of his lyre, it seems 
no idle fable. 

Crowning marvel of all, these temples were never 
created for the multitude. They were but the 
meeting-place of the Pharaoh god with the god of 
the supernal realm. This temple of Karnak, from 
outermost pylon in front to sanctuary in the rear 
nearly a quarter of a mile in length, had no other 
significance but as audience chamber of consulta- 
tion between the Divine Majesty on earth and the 
Divine Majesty in heaven. No wonder so super- 
nal a conception demanded so supernal an embodi- 



310 



EGYPT 



ment ! Yet once this overwhelming temple stood in 
direct connection by a broad sphinx-lined avenue 
of more than a mile with the vast Luxor temple, 
while equally over across the Nile, past the colos- 
sal Memnon statues, and on and on to the temple 
of Kurnah, the Ramesseum, and Medinet Habu, 
great sphinx-lined avenues brought it into like con- 
nection with these stupendous structures. Now 
first one begins to feel Thebes in its day of glory. 
All other ruins seem the ruins of little children at 
their child-play sport of building sand castles on 
the beach. 



PALESTINE 



j It is from Port Said, at the Mediterranean 
end of the Suez Canal, that one embarks 
for Palestine. After dreamy weeks spent among 
the mysterious tombs and temples of the Upper 
Nile, the contrast is startling in coming out upon 
this congested highway of the traffic of the mod- 
ern world. It is the Broadway, the Strand, along 
which, eastward-bound, westward-bound, uninter- 
mittingly stream the long files of steamships. What 
a cut-off of a whole vast continent by a hundred 
miles of digging, and what a concentration, as for 
a view on dress-parade, of the commercial fleets of 
the world ! 

As a witness, however, to the unity of creation 
and to the fact that no good is of merely private 
interpretation, it is gratifying to record how from 
the very start the fishes caught hold of the scope of 
De Lesseps' idea, leaping at the thought of the 
new epoch inaugurated by his enterprise for wider 
piscatory as well as human intercourse ; those of the 
Red and Arabian seas at once rejoicingly plying 
tail and fin for closer acquaintanceship with their 
Mediterranean brothers, and those of the Mediter- 
ranean for wider ethnological relations with their 
congeners of the Orient. Who of enlarged benev- 
olence but must rejoice over a millennial day in 



312 



PALESTINE 



which the languid Eed Sea mother-fish can now 
start out from those tepid waters with her small 
fry languid as herself, to brace their constitutions 
with the tonic coolness of more invigorating floods, 
while countless pulmonic sisters from the north, 
dreading for their own small fry a like inheritance, 
can thus secure a change, as beneficial, to the tropic 
waters of the south. 

On the voyage from Port Said, one first 
touches Palestinian land at Jaffa. It has 
no harbor, and as a heavy sea is generally running 
the disembarkation into boats is more lively than 
agreeable. One jumps headlong from the ship's 
gangway into the arms of the boatmen, and reaches 
footing by faith and not by sight. No boatman, 
however, " muffs," and one cannot but admire the 
dexterity with which they catch "on the fly " very 
stout and hysterically shrieking elderly ladies. 

Spite, however, of all this hurly-burly the well- 
regulated mind contrives to store away in vivid 
memory the picturesque promontory on which the 
town is perched, and the ragged reef off its south- 
ern end, over which the breakers leap in sheets 
of spray. Such mental photographs are of lasting 
value. Henceforth when one reads of the landing 
of the cedars of Lebanon for the temple of Jeru- 
salem ; of J onah embarking for his eventful voy- 
age ; of Dorcas, standing reproof to most of us in 
that she " did what she could ; " of St. Peter's 
vision of the sheet let down filled with clean and 
unclean beasts ; of stout Judas Maccabeus assault- 



JAFFA TO JERUSALEM 313 



ing the town; of the Crusaders again and again 
landing there from the Venetian fleets ; and finally 
of Napoleon raising such a problem in humane 
casuistry through his heroic practice in poisoning 
the sick and wounded in the military hospitals, — 
all will have in it an element of reality otherwise 
not to be felt. Yes, even Perseus and Andromeda, 
after one has seen the very rocks to which the sea- 
monster bound the forlorn maiden, who can longer 
doubt their story? Does not Pliny attest that 
even in his day the chains were still rusting there ! 
And cannot we clinch his testimony by our own 
attestation that the rocks are not yet gone ! 

Ill When Peter the Hermit and his fellow-pil- 
grims went up to Jerusalem, it was under 
volleys of curses and a hail of stones that tested 
the metal of their faith. To-day one sneaks up by 
rail. One cannot escape a haunting sense of hu- 
miliation. Not that curses and stones would not 
be plenty enough at this late date were the courage 
equal to the will. One is on Mohammedan soil 
and under the flag of the " unspeakable Turk," 
but respect for the Christian's cannon overpowers 
hate of the Christian's creed. Fanaticism can only 
" think damn," not act it out. Back in Armenia, 
happily, it is otherwise. There the faithful can 
slaughter Christian men, women, and children, even 
the soldiers lending a helping hand, and the gov- 
ernors diplomatically denying the facts when Eu- 
rope begins to murmur. But here into the train 
one mounts without so much as ground for a ro- 



314 



PALESTINE 



mantic hope that a sporadic little fanatic of an Is- 
lamite boy may throw a stone — not too large — 
through the window. 

Immediately on quitting Jaffa, the train plunges 
into the great plain of Sharon, fertile, but, after 
the Nile valley, not very fertile ; for, under the 
fiery sun of Syria and with no brimming river 
wherewith to slake its thirsty lips, its broad wheat- 
fields and fig, orange, and mulberry plantations 
have no dependence but on the " earlier and later 
rains " of spring. They had already fallen, and all 
was beautiful as one now looked backward over 
the broad level of green relieved against the en- 
croaching sea-sands, the snowy breakers, and the 
sky-blue expanse of the Mediterranean. Spots in- 
timately associated with Scripture story were now 
pointed out on every hand ; but the only one that 
struck home with any vivid sensation was the val- 
ley of Ajalon. There, at five o'clock in the after- 
noon, as we looked off over the valley, hung the 
moon directly above it. Such the haze of the at- 
mosphere that the entire disk was distinctly visi- 
ble. The leap to the lips was instantaneous : " Sun 
stand thou still upon Gibeon, and thou, moon, in 
the valley of Ajalon ! " 

After some twenty miles, the train begins to 
climb the monotonous, barren mountains. Blunted, 
rarely peaked in outline, the gray limestone rocks 
broken into narrow lines of cleavage, without trees 
except gnarled, century-old olives, there is little po- 
etic charm in such scenery unless through aerial 
effects of light and shadow. One startling sen- 



JAFFA TO JERUSALEM 315 



sation, however, the aspect does awaken. Every- 
where are the shattered rocks so sprinkled with red 
poppies and red anemones, or relieved against col- 
lective masses of them, as to suggest the idea of 
flecks and pools of blood. The blood besprinkled 
Mount of Sacrifice! It is impossible to rid the 
mind of the impression. 

One leaves the train at a spot that could not 
have been selected better by mediaeval pilgrim or 
modern artist for a first view of the Holy City. 
On a level with Jerusalem itself three fourths of 
a mile away, a deep abyss opening up between 
the mountain on which it stands and the moun- 
tain from which one looks, there sits the sacred 
city, its walls, its thirty towers, its wilderness of 
domes, and dome-vaulted dwellings. How seem- 
ingly impregnable a situation for security, and yet 
how irresistible an appeal to every heart that has 
ever felt the aspiration and the tragedy, the degra- 
dation and the glory of its age-long human history ! 
Ah, the moans of despair, the yells of execration, 
the anthems of triumph, with which these rocks 
have echoed ! Spite of its abrupt and isolated po- 
sition, there is a profound sense in which the city 
cannot " sit solitary." It is compassed about by 
too great a cloud of witnesses ever to be beheld 
apart from its environment in imagination. David 
is storming the citadel of Mt. Zion. Solomon is 
adorning it with palace and temple. Shishak, king 
of Egypt, is besieging and plundering it. Nebu- 
chadnezzar is haling away, lamenting sore, its sons 
and daughters to captivity in Babylon. Jeremiah 



316 



PALESTINE 



is plaining its woes, and Isaiah prophesying the 
coming glory. Ezra is restoring it. Jesus is weep- 
ing over it. Again Titus is razing it to the ground. 
Constantine is re-adorning it. Khalif Omar is 
breaking in from the desert to rear the mosque of 
Allah on the site of the temple of Jehovah. Anon, 
the ferocious Turks are clutching it by the throat, 
and the Crusaders are wading in blood to their 
saddle-girths through its courts, and Saladin is 
once again planting the crescent on its battlements, 
while to-day the Greek, Latin, Armenian, and Cop- 
tic churches of Christendom are vindictively fight- 
ing over its sacred relics as the Mohammedan looks 
on in lofty scorn, and the Jewish remnant, a nest of 
paupers, is supported by the pious alms of French 
and German bankers. 

Our quarters in Jerusalem lay just outside the 
Jaffa Gate. Never to my dying day shall I cease 
to be thankful for a quiet stroll of a couple of 
hours that first evening around a portion of the 
city walls. The fever of the day was over, and the 
moon poured a flood of softest light over towers 
and battlements and down into the valley of Je- 
hoshaphat. Without and within all was a dream 
of peace. The spiritual presence of Jesus, the 
familiar paths his footsteps trod, the scenes on 
which his eye daily rested, — all were blent in 
one harmonious whole. Over yonder in distinct- 
est outline across the abyss stood the Mount of 
Olives, and low down to the right the Garden of 
Gethsemane. Where in any religion is there a 
symbol remotely to be compared with the story of 



SACRED CITIES 



317 



the passionate love, the mortal agony, the resur- 
rection in spiritual triumph of the life of Jesus ! 
Buddhism with its Nirvana of rest for him who in 
abandonment of despair has seen into the depths 
of the emptiness underlying the All, Brahmanism 
with its thought-less, desire-less, imagination-less, 
reabsorption into the Absolute, what are they be- 
side Jesus' sublime trust in life eternal in the bosom 
of God for the lowliest. Ah, that after that hour 
dissolved in moonlight peace I had left J erusalem 
and seen no more ! 

With the morrow came the sense of disillu- 
sion. It had to be so. Sacred cities, call 
them Buddhist, Mohammedan, Christian, call them 
Benares, Mecca, Jerusalem, are one in essence. 
Deriving their repute from the inspiration of some 
prophet who thought to reveal higher spiritual 
conceptions to the world, they become in the end 
the gaping pilgrimage-resorts of millions of the 
ignorant and superstitious. Nor is this the worst. 
Whatever one's creed as to the spiritual worth of 
the " merits of the saints " held in fee by any 
church for eking out the demerits of the sinful, 
no doubt of their financial value can be enter- 
tained. As an investment in real estate, secure 
for a thousand years from fluctuation on the 
market, the tomb of a prophet eventually rises to 
a higher rate per foot than the most advantageous 
broker's site on Wall Street. It is idle to try 
to blink these ugly facts. " Where the carcass 
is, there will the vultures be gathered together." 



318 



PALESTINE 



Whether transacted in beef and pork, or in crosses 
and crescents, business is business, baptize it in 
whatever sacrilegious name one may. 

Tens of thousands of pilgrims imply no end of 
greedy lodging-house keepers, imply the sharpest 
competition in driving a trade in candles, rosaries, 
and relics, in the sale of farm products from the 
country-people, and in the services of an army of 
rival priests and Levites. Thus, inevitably, the 
entire material prosperity of a holy city is as 
strictly based on the " merits of the saints " as 
Newcastle on coals or Manchester on calicoes ; and 
as, in a great commercial city, each rival firm seeks 
to outdo its neighbor in display of attractions in 
its show-windows, so, in a great holy city, does 
each competing religious body vie with every other 
in the superior variety and marvel of its tinsel 
legends, authentic relics, and miraculous trumpery 
of every sort. In truth, the scourge of small cords 
works a jail-delivery only once. Soon the traders 
are back again, this time to realize a profit out of 
authentic strands of the very cords with which they 
were originally whipped. 

Y There are three frames of mind, each equally 
natural, in which a human being may wan- 
der round among the holy places of Jerusalem and 
Bethlehem. The first is that of the devout village 
pilgrims one encounters in shoals, largely un- 
kempt, powerfully built Russian peasants, igno- 
rant and superstitious beyond compare, and so 
hot-bloodedly emotional as to pass in a moment 



IN WHAT FRAME OF MIND? 319 



from the most groveling prostration before a relic 
to the most savage brutality in a fight with a Latin 
or Coptic fellow-Christian of erroneous views. The 
second is that of the thorough-going disciple of 
Mark Twain, without the genius of the master; 
his only breviary the " Innocents Abroad." He 
journeys to Jerusalem in devoutest faith, that here 
is sanctuary none other can rival for a chance 
at cheap wit based on irreverence, and that once 
there the dullest of men may cherish a rational 
hope of manufacturing a really funny book out of 
incongruities staring him in the face on every hand. 
The third frame of mind is that of the at once 
medievally devout and medievally scholastic man 
of the Cardinal Newman type, one who, having 
eyes, sees only through a haze of preconceptions, 
but through this haze sees with a beauty vastly 
edifying to all who, like himself, are staggered at 
nothing. What, then, shall the visitor do who has 
neither the endowment of the Russian peasant, nor 
of a pseudo-disciple of Mark Twain, nor of a fol- 
lower of Cardinal Newman ? There seems but one 
course for him. 

He is going, say, to the Church of the Holy 
Sepulchre. What does he expect to find there? 
The shrine of pilgrimage of millions of the human 
race from the third or fourth century until to-day. 
Does he suppose they have ever read Emerson 
or Martineau? Or is it his object to try con- 
clusions between his own critical apparatus and 
their purely uncritical imaginations? The Em- 
press Helena, wife of Constantine, with unlimited 



320 



PALESTINE 



means and a most obsequious bishop at command, 
— does he suppose that, when she went out to 
Palestine to settle the position of the holy places, 
she meant to be balked by idle archaeological con- 
siderations? As an adjunct to her critical appa- 
ratus, had she not, for example, supernatural 
dreams to assure her just where under Golgotha 
the three crosses were buried ? And, when a mo- 
mentary doubt arose as to which one of the three 
was the cross of Jesus, did she not, by sending at 
once to the hospital for a moribund patient, fur- 
nish an opportunity to the true cross to work 
a miracle, and so settle the question beyond ra- 
tional dispute? 

No : there is but one way and one spirit in 
which the broadly educated man of to-day can 
intelligently and seriously view the Church of the 
Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. He is there neither 
to praise nor to blame, but to understand. He is 
in the presence of a growth of centuries differing 
totally from his own. The whole spectacle is to 
be taken as a unity, one and indivisible. The 
pillar marking the exact centre of the earth, as 
well as marking the spot from which was taken 
the dust out of which Adam was made, is as much 
a part of the whole imaginative creation as are 
the three authentic holes in the rock into which 
were thrust the three crosses of the crucifixion. 
The grave of Adam exactly underlying the cross 
of the Redeemer, so that the blood of the eternal 
sacrifice should trickle down &nd annul the origi- 
nal sin of him in whom fell the whole human race, 



IN WHAT FRAME OF MIND? 321 

rests on precisely the same foundation of authority 
as the spot where the Virgin Mother stood when 
Jesus commended her to the tender care of the 
beloved disciple. 

On setting out, therefore, for the Church of the 
Holy Sepulchre, let one make a hard and fast vow 
to leave all cheap, rationalistic acumen at home. 
Rather, let him watch and try to enter into the 
feelings of the swarms of Russian pilgrims. See 
them as they break on entering under the high 
arch of the portal, and wildly precipitate them- 
selves at the foot of the "Stone of Holy Unction." 
It is like seeing troops of horses just out of the 
desert break and precipitate themselves at the 
sight of pools of water. Here is the Gate of 
Heaven ! Here is the Promised Land ! Here can 
the blessed Saviour be seen, felt, handled, kissed, 
reveled in through every sense ! The very stone 
on which his crucified body was laid for the anoint- 
ing, the very spot on which Mary stood weeping^ 
the very hole into which was thrust the foot of the 
cross, the very cave and sarcophagus in which 
rested the mangled body till the Angel of the 
Resurrection rent the rock asunder, — oh, to be 
thrice blessed of God in beholding all this, to be 
able to fling the arms passionately around each ob- 
ject, to kiss it over and over, to rub the forehead 
against it, to feel in outright contact with what 
his flesh and blood had been in contact with, — 
this is to see Christ, to become one with Christ, 
to find him tangible, palpable reality ! 

Now first one understands the true spirit of the 



322 



PALESTINE 



Crusades as he watches these pilgrims, men and 
women who had tramped their hundred or thou- 
sand miles to behold the kingdom of heaven radiant 
before their eyes in this vast, tawdry church; 
understands, too, in its massive material-spiritual 
significance, the great Middle Age dogma of tran- 
substantiation, of bread made actual flesh of Christ, 
and wine made actual blood of Christ, till the be- 
liever ate and drank the real body and blood of his 
Lord, all else mere spiritual medium, empty and 
impalpable in comparison. No longer ask, then, 
what you think of all this marvelous spectacle. It 
matters not. Seek only to get at what these pil- 
grims think of it, what it actually is to them, what 
equally it has been to millions behind them and to 
the myriads of Crusaders who spilt their last drop 
of blood in rescuing these holy memorials from the 
hand of the infidel. Then opens to you, child of 
this nineteenth century, a new chapter in human 
history. What made this past so vital, so terrible, 
so glorious, is now before your eyes. 

From the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 
Jerusalem it is a charming stroll of five 
or six miles to Bethlehem and the Church of the 
Nativity. After so many pilgrims and so much 
strain to live into ages that have gone by, it is very 
blissful to feel one's self once again in the living 
presence of nature and out under the old, unchang- 
ing sky. True, it is a barren and rugged nature 
about one. The very wheat-fields along the moun- 
tain crests — if fields they may be called — are so 



A STROLL TO BETHLEHEM 323 



congested with sharply splintered stones that the 
partial clearing of one of them involves burying 
up a full half of the surface under piles of rock 
taken from the other half. Now strikes home 
new insight into the relation between man and his 
environment as one takes in at a glance why the 
prophets of Jerusalem so commonly met death by 
stoning. Murder in the heart of Saul, and St. 
Stephen there, the magazine of death-dealing mis- 
siles is right on hand. But this scene of cruel 
martyrdom, even though it bequeathed to the 
world so divine a prayer, one would now fain dis- 
miss from the mind, and think rather of the sower 
who went forth to sow. No wonder so little seed 
fell upon the good ground. So little good ground 
was there. But the stony places, they were every- 
where. All seemed like looking straight through 
the eyes of J esus, the only way to look would one 
ever get in touch with his soul. 

Ah! what a walk were this but for authentic 
sacred places. Every few hundred paces, and lo ! 
another. Now, alas ! one must pause duly to re- 
vere the slab of stone on which sublime Elijah 
sank when in collapse of despair he cried, " Lord, 
it is enough; now lettest thou thy servant die." 
Nothing more full of the heartbreak of a mighty 
spirit is there in all Hebrew literature. Does it 
gain by one's stopping to see, in physical attesta- 
tion of the weight of the prophet's woe, the full- 
length impress of his body sunk as with a mortal 
die into the rock? O God! cries the soul in re- 
volt, must the monkish awkward squad thus fire 



324 



PALESTINE 



over each hallowed grave. From every side rings 
their ragged fusillade. Passing belief is the ab- 
ject prose of literalism under which are degraded 
the most spontaneous outbursts of the soul. " If 
they should hold their peace, the stones would 
immediately cry out," Jesus passionately retorted 
to the Pharisees incensed with the multitude pro- 
claiming, "Blessed the King that cometh in the 
name of the Lord!" Then think — by way of 
edifying comment on this metaphor of passion — 
of being shown in a shrine four or five authentic 
specimens of the very stones that would have cried 
out, only that the multitude did not hold their 
peace, and so there was no call for lithological 
rebuke. 

The impression wrought by the Church 
of the Nativity is over again that of the 
Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. * 
Once more is experienced the same dazed surprise 
at finding so many sacred places included within 
the walls of a single great building, the same in- 
credulous wonder that each incident in the Gospel 
story should be located to the very inch. Here 
a star on the pavement marks the precise spot on 
which the Holy Child was born ; here another star 
just where the Magi stood ; here still another the 
position of the manger. On this hand a chapel 
shows the recess to which St. Joseph retired when 
he gave thanks at the moment of the Nativity ; on 
this, where the angel descended to command the 
Flight into Egypt; on this, where the Innocents 



THE CHURCH OF THE NATIVITY 325 



were gathered together and buried after Herod's 
massacre. Even the cave-stable, if here it is, is so 
bedizened with marble and tinsel as to be trans- 
formed into a tawdry doll-house. 

A single inspired picture like Correggio's ecstatic 
" Nativity " in the Dresden Gallery, a single glo- 
rifying poem like Milton's " Christmas Hymn," 
and the soul is carried a thousand times nearer in 
actual time and space to the spirit that dictated 
the early Gospel narrative of cave, manger, shep- 
herds, happy young mother, rejoicing of heaven 
with earth, than by all this Bethlehem child's- 
play. For the one is poetry and the other prose. 
Here, alas ! is the whole devout story monopolized 
for vulgar sensation, and degraded to a sacred 
peep-show. Indeed, the very Turkish soldiers on 
guard to keep the Greek, Latin, and Armenian 
monks from tearing one another's hair, should the 
one venture to cross the staked-out " claim " of the 
other, are but fitting symbols of the worth of the 
whole ecclesiastical exhibition. Here, of a truth, 
one looks on at the real Gethsemane, the real 
Agony in the Garden, the crucifixion afresh of 
Jesus. 

• 

yjjj With the general aspects of nature, however, 
in and about Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and 
with the real gain in becoming familiar with them, 
the case is utterly different. Here, in truth, is the 
handiwork of God, — the material body in which 
the spirit once tabernacled, on which time has 
effected little change. The reputed site, say, for 



326 



PALESTINE 



example, of the house of Martha and Mary in 
Bethany — one modern stone hovel amid a hundred 
as sordid would, one might think, awaken no trace 
of interest ; but the view of earth and sky on which 
their eyes looked out, the stony hills, the terraces 
of vines and olives, the fertile spots of pasturage 
in the valley below, the paths trod by Jesus' feet 
to and from the Mount of Olives above, — these 
are more than historical : they are bound up with 
all the imagery of the parables and intimately 
associated with the one real home that was refuge 
and solace to him who so often had not " where to 
lay his head." So with a thousand objects in this 
whole region of spiritual story. One looks off over 
the barren hills among which David was a wan- 
derer and an outcast. The guide points out the 
site of the cave of Adullam, or, perhaps, the exact 
spot where the young hero, dying of thirst for a 
drink from the dear old well in Bethlehem, poured 
out the water on the ground, because, thus pur- 
chased, it was the " blood of his men." But there 
are countless such caves in the limestone of these 
mountains ; and what matters any idle fancy which 
exact one it was in which there gathered to the 
outlawed chief "every one that was in distress, 
and every one that was in debt, and every one that 
was discontented, and he became a captain over 
them." Enough that, with a single sweep of the 
eye, one thus takes in the scene of the bandit life, 
of the refuse material ripe for political revolution, 
of the Sir Philip Sidney chivalry of their heroic 
leader. A realistic setting is thus given to the 



THE SPIRIT AND THE FLESH 327 



Bible story that is a distinct addition, and like 
instances might be multiplied without end. 

Not, indeed, that one does not gladly welcome 
legends whenever there is any genuine human 
nature in them. In Bethlehem, to give an example, 
one visits a shrine built over the supposed spot to 
which Mary retired with the infant Jesus to prepare 
for the flight into Egypt. There one drop of her 
mother milk fell to the ground, ever after impart- 
ing to the dust of the place miraculous power to 
make the milk flow freely in the breasts of all 
mothers unable to nourish their own pining little 
ones. Crude as the legend is, it has at least some- 
thing human in it, something in line with the loving 
tradition of the Gospels. For Jesus, once a babe, 
loved all babes, and knew how sweet was his mother 
Mary's milk. One can sympathize with the sad- 
eyed peasant woman he sees kneeling there, her 
emaciated baby in her arms. But asked to share 
the emotions of a troop of pilgrims hanging in 
idiotic simplicity of adoration over specimens of 
the stones that would have cried out, my own piety, 
I confess, fails. 

IX ^ course, one goes to see and hear the 
wailing of the Jews over the sole remain- 
ing fragment of the foundation wall of their 
national temple, — probably one of the few genuine 
relics of the time of Solomon left in the city, unless 
the subterranean quarries. It is the hilarious cus- 
tom with tourists to laugh at this spectacle as a 
sort of mock exhibition of grief akin to shedding 



328 



PALESTINE 



tears over Adam's grave. To me the scene was 
affecting. Religion and patriotism are one and 
inseparable in the Jewish mind ; and of all their 
former glories there remains to them, in their own 
ancestral city, but this stretch of ruined wall. If 
ever there was a " lost cause," the memory of which 
might remain locked up in the human heart genera- 
tion on generation, surely this is one. Exiles in 
their own home ; dominated by a hateful Moham- 
medan government ; their temple site the seat, 
on which they dare not set foot, of the splendid 
Mosque of Omar; prohibited, at the risk of being 
torn to pieces by ferocious mobs, from so much as 
walking through the street of the Church of the 
Holy Sepulchre, — a real Via Dolorosa to them ; 
with no future, but only a past, to fall back on for 
cheer and hope, — why should there not be pathetic 
sincerity in the litany they chant ? 

" Because of the palace which is deserted, 
We sit alone and weep. 
Because of the temple which is destroyed, 
Because of the walls which are broken down, 
Because of our greatness which is departed, 
Because of the precious stones of the temple ground to powder, 
Because of our priests who have erred and gone astray, 
Because of our kings who have contemned God, — 
We sit alone and weep." 

In J erusalem, its population three fourths Jewish 
and Mohammedan, its Christian temples maintained 
in safety solely through fear of European interven- 
tion, one feels as nowhere else the abiding spir- 
itual characteristics of the Semitic race, and the 
greatness of the gulf that divides it from the 



THE DEAD SEA AND THE JORDAN 329 



Aryan, — the outcome of whose distinct pantheistic 
and philosophical genius, superimposed on the 
simple story of the Gospel, is seen in the vast 
system of theological mythology here so crudely 
represented by the Greek and Latin churches. 
The Mosque of Omar and the Church of the Holy 
Sepulchre, the naked simplicity of the ritual of the 
one, the florid and grotesque symbolism of the 
other, — here are the two great races in salient 
contrast. 

To us, in the saddle most of the time and 
under a blazing Syrian sun, great certainly 
was the fatigue, though greater far the interest, of 
the descent of nearly four thousand feet to Jericho, 
the Dead Sea, and the Jordan. That it is still pos- 
sible on this memorable journey to "fall among 
thieves" — though the good Samaritan be more 
problematical — was evident in the fact that our 
little party of two tourists, a dragoman, and a ser- 
vant, required the escort of a donkey-mounted scrap 
of a Bedouin, a highly decorated gun, six feet in 
length, strapped horizontally across his back. Once 
covenanting with this tawny son of Ishmael for a 
certain sum in shekels, metaphorically we were 
taken to have " eaten his salt," and so, under the 
protecting aegis of the laws of hospitality, to be 
exempt from further robbery at the hands of his 
tribe. As he would sway from side to side, the 
muzzle of his weapon described such areas of 
ninety or more degrees, that we who rode behind 
felt in him a veritable object of terror, and so 
possessed our souls in peace. 



330 



PALESTINE 



It was good to be out among the mountains, 
stern and forbidding as they looked, and to be 
storing away first-hand mental pictures. Every 
now and then we would come upon a gaunt, sun- 
blackened shepherd walking in front of his flock, 
the sheep "following him." "The Lord is my 
shepherd, I shall not want." Ay, but without a 
shepherd knowing where lies every nibble of grass 
and every trickling water-spring, how these thirsty, 
pining creatures must want. " Read with empha- 
sis ! " insisted in the school our early teachers. 
That one word want, — ah ! with what emphasis 
did famine and thirst ejaculate it here. Yes, how 
deep-lying in sharp sensation is all poetic imagery ! 
and how eternally true of facts, " They learn in suf- 
fering what they teach in song." 

Then, farther on, we would come upon the ruins 
of an old Crusader castle, bleached, bare, and with 
no green ivy to mantle its wounds and scars. Oh, 
the cruel disillusioning that must have come over 
those fanatic warriors, their brains aflame with 
visions of the Promised Land, when, once they 
had stormed the sacred city and sated their lust 
of blood, they found themselves monotonously set 
down on these desolate mountains, amidst swarms 
more fanatic than themselves, to hold fast this Fata 
Morgana exhalation of desert sand. With what 
yearning must Europe have risen before the mind's 
eye, the castle on the Loire, the castle on the Rhine ! 

More impressive still, stand and gaze down into 
the savage gorge at the bottom of which courses 
the brook Cherith. For a picture of raven-fed 



THE DEAD SEA AND THE JORDAN 331 



Elijah, what a background of solitary desolation ! 
Yes, God pity the prophet there whom the ravens 
should not find out and succor ! And yet to the 
side of the gorge, like a limpet to a rock, clings 
a monastery, where centuries on centuries succes- 
sive bands of Carmelite monks have dwelt. Piteous 
the irony of the fate of the poor Crusaders ; but, 
irony of ironies would you ponder and fathom it, 
is it not witnessed in brotherhoods of ascetic monks, 
self -exiled in this savage gorge to commune with 
the mighty spirit of Elijah, and yet doomed to 
seek their ravens in the profits of carving salad- 
spoons for gadding tourists out of holy w r ood from 
the Mount of Olives ? 

Striking views begin to open up over a wide 
expanse as one nears the verge of the mountain 
region. What a presence of ages of history and of 
historical legend ! In sight is the top of Pisgah 
lifting from behind the mountains of Moab; in 
sight, the river that rolled back for the passage of 
Joshua's bands; in sight, the mound-heaps of old 
Jericho, toppled down at the blast of the rams' 
horns of the priests. These, and the Mount of 
Temptation to which the Devil carried Jesus, the 
grave of Moses set up in rivalry by the Moham- 
medans, the pool of bitter water Elisha made sweet 
ever after by casting in a handful of salt, the whole 
stretch of the Jordan valley, and, shining in the 
distance, the glassy surface of the Dead Sea ! 

Unquestionably, over these Moab mountains de- 
scended Joshua and his desert-toughened, desert- 
famished Bedouins. What the cry " The sea! the 



332 



PALESTINE 



sea ! " of Xenophon's army, to their cry as their 
eyes feasted on the verdure of the Jordan valley as 
then it was ! 

Fresh from reading the Book of Joshua, fresh 
from the primitive chroniclers of the first Moham- 
medan campaigns, how realistically one saw and 
felt that it was one and the same historic story 
repeated at vast intervals of time. The same fiery 
and vindictive tribal God of the desert, — the su- 
pernatural Bedouin, with a few genuine tribal 
Bedouin virtues in his heart, ever ready to reward 
the faithful with the illimitable booty of idola- 
trous cities and idolatrous women, — such alike the 
Jahveh of Joshua and the Allah of Mohammed! 
One pays afresh his tribute of grateful reverence 
to devoutly brave old Christian Bishop Ulfilas, in 
that clear back in the fourth century he should have 
refused so stoutly to translate for his converted 
Goths the Book of Joshua. No, the Goths need 
no revelation from on high to incite to rapine and 
murder; enough of it have they by nature with- 
out the aid of grace ! Such the ringing word of the 
stout old bishop. Yet out of these ferocious begin- 
nings were to grow, at last, as consummate spiritual 
flower, the sublime strains of Isaiah and the par- 
able of the Prodigal Son. 

In contradiction of its name, forever will the 
Dead Sea hold in one mind, at least, a green and 
living memory. Not that its environing mountains 
are not desolate enough, but what sternness will 
not aerial light robe in a bridal veil of beauty! 
The air was breathless, and perfect the reflection 



THE DEAD SEA AND THE JORDAN 333 



of sky and range. Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot and 
his wicked daughters, fire and brimstone from on 
high, seemed all out of keeping with the radiant 
sunshine. For months nowhere had my friend 
and I found ourselves where it was possible to 
enjoy the luxury of a swim, and now red-hot with 
long hours in the saddle under such a blazing sun, 
rank ingratitude had it seemed not to answer the 
invitation of these crystal-clear waters. 

Often as has been described the delight of float- 
ing on the buoyant surface of the Dead Sea, the 
experience is one only to be interpreted in terms 
of private consciousness. Under the spell of such 
sparkling levity, presto ! vanishes the heavy and 
the weary weight of gravitation, in contemptuous 
refutation of every law of Newton. The elastic 
flood tosses one up in its arms as a proud and 
happy mother her crowing babe. Dainty Ariel, 
thistledown floating in the sunbeams, all other 
airy-fairy creatures, you are one with them in 
spirit now. The more you weigh, the less you 
weigh. Here is the real hydrostatic paradox ! 

From the shore of the Dead Sea to the ford of 
the Jordan, the traditional spot of the baptism of 
Jesus, the ride lies through an arid region whose 
chief foliage is a scrub growth of Spina Christie 
the accredited plant of the crown of thorns. Only 
a narrow fringe of trees separates the stream from 
the alkali-eaten stretches on either side. Disap- 
pointing was the sight of the river as, swollen by 
the melting snows of Hermon far to the north, the 
swift and turbid current rolled and eddied along. 



334 



PALESTINE 



There, too, alas ! was the noise and inane laughter 
of a swarm of lunching tourists. Ah ! why are 
all tourists of another party so sacrilegiously com- 
monplace ? Temporarily one forgets good Bishop 
Ulfilas, and breathes a sigh that Joshua might de- 
scend once more from these Moab mountains to 
smite hip and thigh such Canaanitish idolaters. 
There is but one thing for it, to steal away to 
some quiet spot farther up or down the river and 
there to try to think one's own thought. " Thou, 
when thou prayest, enter thy closet and shut the 
door." How often in the Holy Land recur these 
words. Either find such inner sanctuary in the 
soul itself, or better be anywhere than in Palestine. 
And yet and yet ! Every hour is the mind storing 
away imagery that in later days, when the dust 
has settled and the fever has cooled, will make 
a thousand incidents in the Gospel story so very, 
very real. And yet and yet ! 

" heart ! weak follower of the weak, 
That thou should'st compass land and sea 
In this far place that God to seek, 
Who long ago had come to thee." 



BAALBEC AND DAMASCUS 



j As on a sunny morning one steams into the 
harbor of Beyrout, in northern Syria, how 
entrancing a picture ! The Lebanon ranges are 
full in view, their higher peaks white with snow ; 
while, embowered in plantations of fig, olive, mul- 
berry, and orange trees, the white houses of the 
city peep through on the hillside. Along the 
sands below curve the fleecy wave-line and bright 
blue waters of the Mediterranean. For a week to 
come, we are to be driving over these mountains 
and down among the oasis valleys of Baalbec and 
Damascus. 

Rather in Kansas or Montana than in Syria 
one would look for startling impressions of the 
march of modern improvement. It is a mistake. 
Go instead to Syria for a real sensation. The 
road on which one drives to-day equals any over 
the passes of Switzerland. What does this mean 
in the land of the " unspeakable Turk," under the 
blight of whose rule all mildews and goes to ruin ? 
Only the iron hand of Europe laid in arrest on the 
shoulder of Asia, with its stern word, " So far and 
no farther ! " The road, the work of French cap- 
ital, is safeguarded against Moslem cupidity and 
kept in working order by French energy and 
science marshaling the labor of the native popu- 



336 BAALBEC AND DAMASCUS 



lation, and finding no more faithful labor any- 
where, if fairly treated. Close beside this triumph 
of modern engineering runs the old trail from 
Damascus, torn and gullied almost out of recogni- 
tion, over which are painfully laboring great cara- 
vans of heavily burdened asses and camels, the poor 
brutes picking their way and bruising their knees 
after the good old ancestral fashion. Further 
still, already is a mountain railway from Beyrout 
to Damascus in rapid advance before the eye, and 
soon will be witnessed side by side the bewildering 
medley of locomotives and trains shrieking their 
fiery way along, of carriages and pack-wagons 
rolling smoothly over a macadamized road, and 
of long trains of camels, in alternate pathos of 
patience and snarls of sullen wrath, floundering 
their way among the rocks of the dilapidated old 
trail. For thousands of years, from Damascus, 
Palmyra, Aleppo, Bagdad, J erusalem, Mecca, have 
these vast caravans conveyed the trade between 
India, Persia, Arabia, Syria, and the European 
world. But lo ! before the sight a new epoch in 
history-building. 

In the modern crusade of Europe against Asia, 
Peter the Hermit has become a railway engineer, 
no longer with the ragged rabble behind him he 
first led out, but the science, literature, politics, 
law, moral and religious ideas of a higher civiliza- 
tion. No farther back than 1860 had there been 
a hideous massacre of the Christian population of 
Damascus at the hand of Moslem fanaticism. This 
led to French intervention, and thus did the blood 



BEYROUT AND THE LEBANON RANGES 337 



of the martyrs become the seed of the railway 
church. 

In long circuitous curves to the top of the pass, 
at an altitude of over five thousand feet, the road 
winds its way, skirting mountain precipices and 
slopes treeless except for olives, but terraced up 
in dizziest heights for patches of wheat and vines. 
Where the grapes get the wit and patience to elab- 
orate such rich juices out of so desiccated a soil is 
a moral lesson to all whose own mental soil belongs 
to a like arid geological formation. It fairly 
makes one tremble to think how inexorably he 
will be judged if, by hook or by crook, he does not 
contrive to grow and ferment bumpers of spiritual 
champagne. 

Once at the top of the pass, however, the most 
poetic conception of the Pisgah outlook that has 
ever ravished the soul is faint before reality. 
Three thousand feet below, nestled down between 
the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon ranges, stretches 
a level valley that shines like a lake of emerald. 
It is six or eight miles broad and thirty long, and 
the eye, turning to it from the sun-smitten moun- 
tains, fairly pastures on such greenness. Pre- 
existent states of soul emerge from long-forgotten 
aeons of time when one was driven down with his 
fellow -kine from these arid heights to wander 
knee-deep in such lush exuberance, bruise out its 
streaming juices, and, fully sated, at length to lie 
down and ruminate in pastoral Nirvana. Yet, 
along with this elemental sense, the root in us of 
all higher sense, is blent the richer content of our 



338 BAALBEC AND DAMASCUS 



dear human nature. While we still pasture below, 
we yet lift up our eyes on high. For yonder, over 
there, tower the snow-crowned ranges of Mt. Her- 
mon, leading the mind on into Galilee. 

^ For a book to set a boy's mind on fire and 
awaken yearnings that some day will fulfill 
themselves in actual sight, commend me to William 
Ware's " Zenobia" and the visions it conjures up 
of Palmyra, — a dream of Greek architectural 
beauty set in a luxurious oasis and surrounded by 
thirsty desert, Bedouins and camels thrown in ad 
libitum to the top of a boy's enchanted imagina- 
tion. Alas ! we had not time to spare for Palmyra, 
but Baalbec is an example of the same type of 
city, and to Baalbec were we bound. The broad 
luxuriant valley but now described, and along 
which we were the next day driving, had been the 
feeder of its population, the great caravans had 
been the fleets that piled up its former wealth. 
A Grseco-Roman city in Syria, — one of the host 
that once beautified this now for centuries devas- 
tated land, — a city, the foundation- walls of its 
Acropolis laid in gigantic blocks by old Assy- 
rian Baal worshipers, then crowned with sumptu- 
ous Greek sun-temples by Roman emperors, then 
further surmounted with Mohammedan towers and 
forts, the ruins of all this were we to see, ruins 
to-day standing in loneliness of desolation, the 
city's former wealth, population, almost its very 
name, for ages gone. 

Briskly rub Aladdin's lamp and the genie ap- 



DAMASCUS 



339 



pears in a night to rear a stately city with its 
palaces and gardens. All through the East one 
learns to feel this imagery. The genii are water, 
labor at unlimited command and at infinitesimal 
price, caravans focusing in a given spot converging 
streams of wealth. Here are the magic powers by 
which the city rises like an exhalation, or, cut off 
from which, it sinks back into solitary ruin. Such 
a ruin is Baalbec to-day, a squalid, straggling vil- 
lage fringing an acropolis crowned by great tem- 
ples and palaces that tell of by-gone glory. 

That day, the first time for months, we were 
troubled by rain. What boy, however, brought 
up in childhood on William Ware but rises to 
the occasion ! If the actual sun does not shine, 
he creates one and pours out its beams in golden 
glory over the superb colonnades. The fallen col- 
umns he sets up on end beside their still stand- 
ing mates. The aqueducts he reconstructs and 
brims with creative water ; the naked hillsides he 
clothes with palaces and irrigated gardens ; the 
long gone commercial wealth he brings in again to 
the crowded bazaars on the backs of the gaunt 
camels. Out of the ruins rises before his mind's 
eye the once splendid and luxurious city, and into 
them he sees it sink again, ah, with what refrain 
of time and mortality sighing through his soul ! 

To reach Damascus one crosses the Anti- 
Lebanon range, setting out for an eight or 
nine hours' drive from Sthora. Ever more forbid- 
ding grow the scorched mountain defiles, till sud- 



340 BAALBEC AND DAMASCUS 



denly at their feet, a river from its birth, leaps out 
at a bound the Abana. The magic wand is found. 
" Give me water and a desert and I will create a 
paradise!" lo! the Oriental version of Archimedes. 

Truly with two forms of nature-worship, lifted 
to devoutest and most grateful faith, the heart 
lovingly sympathizes, — the worship of the sun 
and the worship of water. " Are not Abana and 
Pharphar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the 
waters of Israel?" Yes, O Naaman, the Syrian, 
recreant wert thou to the manifest divinities of thy 
Damascus not thus to sound their praise ! 

Now at once springs forth a new creation. 
Reeds and grass grow lush, flowers bloom scarlet 
and gold, almond-trees fling out a wealth of white 
blossoms, houses and embowering gardens line the 
banks. In this magnificent water-supply, dispersed 
over the immense plain through a thousand chan- 
nels and leaping up into fountains in every court- 
yard, one now reads the perennial story of Damas- 
cus : " While other cities of the East have risen 
and decayed, it is still what it was. It was founded 
long centuries before Baalbec and Palmyra, and it 
has outlived them both. While Babylon is a heap 
in the desert, and Tyre a ruin on the shore, it re- 
mains what it was called in the prophecies of Isaiah, 
' the head of Syria.' " 

Yet here, as in every region of Syria, the blight 
of Mohammedanism and the slime of the Turk is 
over all. Every element of the sensuous paradise 
is at hand, — pools of water, the constant murmur 
of rivulets, gardens of pomegranates, figs, plums, 



DAMASCUS 



341 



apricots, marble-lined courts, shady and perfumed 
with fruit-laden orange-trees and cool with the 
spray of jetting fountains. Still, all wears a look 
of neglect and decay, of suspicion and fear. In 
the vast bazaars, shut in from the sun by over- 
head nettings, is displayed a bewildering variety of 
Oriental manufactures, — silks, weapons, saddles, 
embroideries, — and through them streams the 
strangest medley of tribes and garbs. But a scent 
of fanaticism, lust, and bloodthirstiness is on the 
very air. Uncaged tigers would not quicker leap 
to carnage than, dared they, would these tigers of 
Allah. 

Visit such of the dwellings of the wealthy as 
strangers are admitted to, and what a story they 
tell of lack of any trace of the sanctity of the 
home, of any interest in thought ; what a story 
of the mere sensuous existence of the bath, the 
harem, the siesta, coffee, and the pipe. On the out- 
side these houses are blank walls, or, where they 
have windows, they are shut in with jealous screens 
of delicate openwork carving. But once within 
the courtyards, paved and on all sides faced with 
richly colored marbles, murmuring with the sound 
of water, and set with orange and myrtle, momen- 
tarily one feels the spell of the siren incantation. 
All this on earth, and paradise thrown in ! Gra- 
cious is Allah to the faithful ! Who would not 
renounce forever study, literature, society, art, phi- 
losophy, reform, to dream away life in such nar- 
cotic repose ? 

To such enticing questionings as these were we 



342 BAALBEC AND DAMASCUS 



men left in the courtyards, and to the improving 
society of the coal-black eunuchs, brutes unskill- 
f ully carved in ebony, and ready at a sign to basti- 
nado or bowstring the fairest of recalcitrant wives. 
On the other hand, the ladies with us were admitted 
into the inner sanctuary of the harem. 

The only peoples, says Schopenhauer, who have 
ever understood woman are the peoples of the 
East. They lock her up, as unfit to go abroad. 
Less grounded in philosophy, the ladies of our 
party returned not duly impressed with the privi- 
lege of lounging all day on divans, eating sweet- 
meats, and smoking pipes, but rather with a look 
in their eyes that seemed to presage a swift return 
to America to preach a new crusade for the deliv- 
ery of the Holy Sepulchre of their outraged sister- 
hood from the defiling hand of the infidel. In 
vain we superiorly introduced them to the eunuchs 
as the natural custodians of their unstable sex. 
Ideals vary so ! The most beatified conception 
of the guardian angel of womanhood to which the 
Mohammedan mind can rise assumes the guise of 
the brute-jawed, coal-black eunuch. 

Many the books on comparative religion we 
read to-day, but an hour with one's own eyes is 
worth them all. Mohammedanism is the only 
great world-religion that originated with a semi- 
barbarian, with a prophet who could neither read 
nor write, a man of no knowledge outside the man- 
ners and traditions of a narrow desert tribe, a man 
of such enormous sensual passion and bloodthirsty 
ferocity as to be capable of slaughtering a husband 



DAMASCUS 



343 



in the morning and forcing his wife to marriage 
the same night. From such a mind and character, 
a flame of native eloquence, impassioned in inten- 
sity of adoration of a deity who was a consuming 
fire against idolatry, a model, too, of equity, sim- 
plicity, and kindliness after the code of morals of a 
semi-nomad clan, — from such a prophet Islam de- 
rived its enduring ideal of the man after Allah's 
own heart, the infallible declarer of Allah's will, the 
exceptional favorite on whom Allah lavished, by 
special revelation of what he esteemed the choicest 
blessing at his command, a far larger multiplicity 
of wives than was accorded unto others. Into the 
minds and passions of millions Mohammed burned 
his own personal characteristics, and his followers 
have always borne his impress. 

Utterly different was it with the ideal of the other 
great world-religions, the ideal of the Confucianist, 
of the Buddhist, of the Brahman, of the Zoroas- 
trian, of the Christian. Confucius was a culti- 
vated, reflective, benevolent sage ; the Buddha 
was all tenderness and compassion ; Zoroaster was 
a mind profoundly impressed with the stupendous 
conflict of Good with Evil ; the thinkers of Brah- 
manism were deep speculative philosophers, re- 
cluses from the world of strife and passion ; the 
central thought of Jesus was, " He that loveth 
dwelleth in God and God in him." 

It is altogether idle to dream that such utterly 
contrasted ideals leave no mark on the peoples 
that embrace them. The moderation and equity 
of Confucius, the Buddha's tenderness of compas- 



344 BAALBEC AND DAMASCUS 



sion, the piety and self-sacrifice of Jesus, survive 
in millions of hearts to-day, just as literally as the 
lust of Mohammed burns on in every harem in 
Delhi, Cairo, and Damascus, and in every slave- 
mart in the East ; just as literally as the ferocity 
of Mohammed flames out afresh in every Bulga- 
rian, Lebanon, or Armenian massacre. 

Happy for Mohammedanism, by reason of its 
conquest of the Roman Empire of the East, of 
India, and of Grsecized Persia, it shared at the 
outset the rare good fortune of entering on a 
splendid inheritance of culture, art, literature, and 
science. But the revival that followed in architec- 
ture, philosophy, medicine, was never its original 
work. It was the work of Greek scholars, artists, 
physicians in the pay of Islam ; the work of Indian 
and Grseco-Persian architects, poets, and thinkers, 
rebaptized with Mohammedan names. So far as 
of its own spirit and essen.ce it goes, in all places 
and in all times, — at least in the example of its 
rulers and privileged classes, — Mohammedanism 
has tended to kill out all higher life in the harem 
and to keep aflame tiger passions in the heart. 
While the rank and file of the humble — because 
too poor to indulge in its sensual paradise on earth 
— escape its worst blight, and are often models 
of industry, temperance, and fidelity to trust, they 
none the less share to the full its savage fanati- 
cism, and postpone the harem only till they shall 
get to heaven. 

Indeed, historically, has not the claim made in 
behalf of naked, numerical monotheism — unless 



DAMASCUS 



345 



as a protest against groveling idolatry — been 
utterly over-urged ? The moral content, the genu- 
ine humanity of a deity, is there not here some- 
thing of infinitely deeper import than his unity or 
his omnipotent sway ? Why were not a hierarchy of 
such saints as Francis of Assisi, Philip Neri, and 
Vincent de Paul an unspeakable boon as spiritual 
rulers of the universe, and to be exalted over any 
sole and absolute divine monarch as yet imperfectly 
evolved out of the Bedouin stage ? Surely to come 
home to the heart of woman and to help lift her out 
of a state of degradation into a realm of dignity, 
one Virgin Mary, enthroned on high by the wor- 
shiping heart as Queen of Heaven, is worth a 
thousand Allans. 



ASIA MINOR AND GREECE 



j In delicious spring weather, the sail from 
Beyrout to Smyrna all around the southern 
and western coasts of Asia Minor, and among the 
islands of the archipelago, is one of the rich expe- 
riences of a lifetime. Even if the ever freshly 
unfolding scene spoke nothing historical, the mere 
sight of the snow-crowned Taurus ranges, the pic- 
turesque coasts and countless mountain-crested 
islands, would hold the mind in unbroken delight. 
But the whole atmosphere is as full of legend, his- 
tory, and biography as the background of the Sis- 
tine Madonna of cherub heads. Almost from the 
start one meets Paul in Tarsus, Alexander the 
Great at Issus, Cicero in Cilicia. Iliad and 
Odyssey soon become realistic guidebooks. What 
a breeding-place these islands for the sea-rovers 
and pirates that at last stopped plundering one 
another, and joined their barks together for a 
general descent upon Troy ! Then, too, the lazy, 
riotous fellows left behind, hating work, with end- 
less capacity for meat and drink, and never taking 
no for an answer, even from the most distracted 
widow, — how easy to transform them into poor spin- 
ning Penelope's greedy suitors, needing to be thrust 
out neck and heels on the return home of the much 
wandering master. Ail the types are in unquick- 



348 ASIA MINOR AND GREECE 



ened germ before the eye to-day, from Achilles to 
Thersites, the hints in nature of what another 
Homer might make of them. But, alas ! the cities 
of Ionia, the temples, the poets, the philosophers 
are not, — only the sunny atmosphere that bred 
their early splendid civilization. 

Why is it, one cannot but exclaim, that our own 
Atlantic coast is set up geologically after so nig- 
gardly a fashion ? It is a positive affront to the 
American people, a stigma of commonplace stamped 
on the brow of the great Republic ! From Sandy 
Hook to the end of Florida not an eminence rears 
its head over seventy feet high, and then eminent 
only for sand. Prosaic beyond description the 
whole mortal stretch, while the Mediterranean 
shores are one succession of scenic glories. Grate- 
fully, perhaps, one may except the coast of Maine 
as poetic enough for every-day prosaic republicans. 
But even at Mt. Desert how sad the dearth of sirens 
on Round Porcupine, of Cyclops on Burnt Por- 
cupine, of Agamemnons, Nestors, and Ulysseses, 
distributed as miniature kings, on the other little 
Porcupines. Perhaps the Maine kings died with- 
out a Homer. Geologically speaking, nothing short 
of a stupendous volcanic upheaval in the interest 
of the picturesque from Sandy Hook to Key West 
can ever give us the inspiration to poetry the Med- 
iterranean furnishes at every turn. 

^ Through its figs, every one cherishes with 
Smyrna fond associations from his days of 
earliest innocence, and to this tender tie a mature 



SMYRNA 



349 



one is added when lie sails into its bay and harbor 
encircled with mountains, and beautiful as the Bay 
of Naples. The city fronts the water with a superb 
quay two miles in length, and backed by handsome 
residences. Of course, the French built it, — 
another outcome of the Damascus massacre, and 
as eyesore a reproof to the unspeakable Turk of 
how to do things as could be devised. Also due 
to the French is the paving of two or three of the 
streets behind the quay, an act perhaps even more 
offensive in its pointed reflection on the streets 
beyond. 

For the life of me, in the first drive we took, I 
could not keep out of mind the image of a precise 
New England schoolmarm, passionately addicted to 
object-lessons, out for a drive with a class of little 
boys and girls, and bent on improving their minds 
with the contrast between French and Turkish 
methods of metropolitan administration. "Now, 
dear children," I seemed to hear her say, as the 
carriage rolled smoothly over the level pavement, 
" this is the French idea of how to pave a street. 
Here a vehicle would last for years, for, as you 
see, there is no strain nor wrench on wheel or 
axle." Then, suddenly, as, on turning a corner 
into another street, the carriage struck a nest of 
boulders that bounced the party a foot up into 
the air and knocked their heads together, on re- 
covery did I seem to hear the faithful woman add 
gaspingly, "And this the Tur-tur-ki-ish ! " But as 
the drive went on it was no more possible to hold 
the children's attention to the subject of compara- 



350 ASIA MINOR AND GREECE 



tive metropolitan administration than were they so 
many kernels of pop-corn on a fire. All was one 
pathetic outcry over bruised knees, elbows, and 
skulls. Still, so severe the intellectual impression 
made, that the normally educated young woman re- 
turned — as I myself did — with deeper convic- 
tions than ever to her object-lessons. "History, 
dear children, history, as you may recall my re- 
marking more than once before, teaches by exam- 
ples. How profound a truth ! And now, while I 
get out my bottle of chloroform liniment and my 
box of Perry Davis's Pain Killer, and apply them 
to you, remember that no knowledge not bought at 
a price is of lasting value." 

Smyrna has no churches, mosques, or ruins of 
any historical interest, for which my friend and I 
felt most devoutly grateful. Blessed, in certain 
moods, the land that has no history ! Four or five 
days of delicious exemption from sensations of the 
sublime or instructive in art or history ! Days in 
which we could lie in the lap of nature, smoothing 
out the wrinkles on our thought-furrowed brows, 
to resume sunny looks of youth for Athens. One 
single feat of physical energy we did achieve, toil- 
ing up, by a gentle declivity, a height of fully 
three hundred feet that overlooks the city, and is 
crowned by the dilapidated ruins of an old Turkish 
fort. What a view seaward over the bay and the 
blue Mediterranean, landward over mountains and 
fertile valleys, peaceful with a soft atmosphere as 
of eternal childhood eating figs ! Behind the moun- 
tains, charmingly hidden from sight, lay Ephesus. 



CONSTANTINOPLE 



351 



Should we go there ? No, the interest of Ephesus, 
we argued, is now wholly archaeological. The 
temples are gone, and nothing but their sites re- 
main. The same kind of site is here in the 
beauty of the surrounding scenery. Why not, 
then, lie here day-dreaming, and so reconstruct the 
temples ! The argument proved unanswerable. In 
other words, we were on a tourist-strike. 

The three most beautiful regions of the 
globe, said Alexander von Humboldt, are 
the Bay of Naples, the Bavarian Highlands, and 
Constantinople. It is a pleasure to quote so com- 
petent an authority, since to Constantinople my 
friend and I did not get. Cholera and quarantine, 
not desire or will, were the guilty cause. Great the 
temptation to hide the humiliating fact under a 
vivid eye-witness picture of the Bosphorus, con- 
structed out of pure interior consciousness with 
hints from Murray. But, alas ! this is a book of 
genuine personal impressions, and where there were 
none, wise or foolish, entertaining or stupid, they 
are conscientiously omitted. 

Our first introduction to Attica was finding 
ourselves at six in the morning off the pro- 
montory of Sunium, its abrupt precipice crowned 
* with the columns of a ruined temple. Here was 
a classic greeting, for whose poetic fitness one 
could not but be devoutly grateful. For the morn- 
ing itself, however, it was not easy to be so grate- 
ful. It was wet and chilly, and after nearly six 



352 ASIA MINOR AND GREECE 



months of unbroken sunshine one becomes too 
spoiled a child of warmth and color not to resent 
the intrusion of a day of rain. Still, there, in 
distinct outline before our eyes, were iEgina and 
Salamis, and, later on, through the misty distance, 
the Acropolis itself. Could we not, then, supply 
sunshine enough out of Plato, Sophocles, and 
Phidias to light up all with glory ! 

However widely one has traveled, it is a distinct 
surprise on landing at a port like Piraeus, where 
the acquisition of Greek is attended with so little 
pain, not to find the citizens sitting around on every 
hand, enthusiastically reading the Crito or the Re- 
public, or laughing hilariously over the humor of 
the Clouds or the Birds. One fears the influence 
even of classic literature is overrated, when, instead, 
twenty men spring to supply a cab, and tooters 
from rival hotels in Athens stuff whole stacks of 
cards into his reluctant hands. Yet what but classic 
literature has brought so many strangers here, or 
thus furnished a mellow soil in which twenty cab- 
men grow where before grew but one ? 

By noon we were in Athens, be it confessed 
more eager to repair our own ruins with lunch 
than to flee to others that we knew not of. That 
done, the afternoon was all before us where to 
choose. My friend elected to stay at home, to wait 
for sunshine, and to knit up the raveled sleeve of 
his emotions over Plato's Symposium or Murray's 
Guide. So I sallied out alone, firm of intent to go 
nowhere in especial, — a purpose that had been 
carried out to the letter but that lo ! a fresh illustra- 



THE PARTHENON 



353 



tion was suddenly called for of Cromwell's famous 
saying : " A man never goes so far as when he 
knows not whither he is going." Over a row of 
house-tops the Acropolis reared its head, and my 
fate was sealed. 

A sudden fear, as on opening a telegram, 
overcomes one when about to enter the 
august presence of an object he has for years read 
and dreamed about. What will the message evoke ? 
Congratulations for a birth or the sense of blight 
at a death ? The Parthenon, — how many happy 
hours had I enjoyed through life over its friezes 
and the superb figures from its pediments ! How 
many books had I devoured, how many detail 
drawings studied, how many brilliant descriptions 
read of its first glories, till in imagination I could 
see in splendid pageant the procession climbing the 
steps of the Propylsea, and the temple stood forth 
the one matchless Pallas Athene, brain-birth of 
minds like Pericles and Phidias ! And now in a 
moment I was to stand in its actual presence. 

Hurrying up the steep flights of the Propylaea, 
and scarcely looking to the right or left till I 
reached the gateway through which the whole ruin 
of the Parthenon stands visible, what was the first 
sensation awaiting me ? I must be sincere, though 
the aesthetic heavens fall, — a sensation of painful 
disappointment. Fresh from the presence of such 
overwhelming ruins as those of Denderah, Abydos, 
Luxor, and Karnak in Egypt, there was no sense 
of awe in what I saw before me, no suggestion of 



354 ASIA MINOR AND GREECE 



a Lear wrestle with the elements, in which the 
broken monarch stood out sublimer than all the 
rack of thunder, rain, and lightning. Ah, the 
pity of it, the pity of it ! was the sharp cry of pain. 
There are buildings that can endure being ruined, 
and survive in triumph. A hall like Karnak, a 
mediaeval castle like Conway, can be shattered by 
earthquake, blown up by gunpowder, battered and 
breached by cannon-balls, and still look more im- 
perial than ever. But a perfect Grecian temple 
was never made for a ruin, any more than an or- 
chestra to have its harp-strings cut and its viols 
shattered, any more than a lovely marble face to 
have an eye destroyed or its smile-wreathed lips 
dashed in. The harmony was all. In the spiritual 
contribution of each co-working feature lay the 
spell. 

Of course,»one knows beforehand that the Par- 
thenon is in ruins. Who has not made his passion- 
ate Isis search for the mangled remnants of this 
beautiful Osiris, scattered through all the lands! 
It is those broken fragments, those floating strains 
of music, that have prophesied to us of the once 
perfect whole. Every section of its frieze, what 
a masterpiece of grace, dignity, action, fire ! 
Every figure on its pediments, and the whole in 
combination, what a vision vouchsafed the sight 
of the gods on Olympus ! Each column or archi- 
trave how it led on the mind to its harmonious 
relations with the rest ! The material, too, costly as 
precious stones, was everywhere relieved with gild- 
ing and bronze, and with delicately shaded back- 



THE PARTHENON 



355 



grounds, to set off the figures. To Phidias, what 
remains to-day would seem but the half-erected 
scaffolding. He who, compassed about with his 
glorious peers, had created this dream of beauty, 
could recreate it in his mind's eye. There it 
already preexisted before a stone was laid. But 
who of us can reconstruct so much as a broken 
hand or dented brow or wind-tossed drapery? 
Here recasting imagination faints, and sinks 
moaning to the ground. The Orpheus lyre, whose 
harmonies should sing these scattered fragments 
into place, it is not ours to strike. There they lie, 
— the graciously wrought stones by the thousands 
of tons, as in a brute stone-cutter's yard. It is a 
sight to weep over. No, I repeat it, a perfected 
Greek temple was never made for a ruin. A 
group of detached columns, suggesting nothing 
beyond themselves, may make a beautiful picture. 
But there is at once too much and too little of the 
Parthenon left behind. 

It was, I know, a dank, chilly afternoon, that of 
my first visit to the Acropolis ; and rain and ruins, 
mingling with constitutional tendencies to depression 
over the wrecks of time and fate, constitute an ill 
sort of personal equation that must be allowed for. 
Not so much as a light-minded tourist had ventured 
out to relieve my mind by jocular gayeties over the 
Venetian bombshell that had thus effectually 
hoisted with its petard so much good marble, or 
hilariously to demand if it would not have been fun 
to see things jump. For two whole hours, rain and 
chill and I had our comments all to ourselves over 



356 ASIA MINOR AND GREECE 

Propylsea, Nike Apteros, Erectheion, Parthenon, 
with frequent interpolations of texts from the fate- 
burdened Lamentations of Jeremiah. Nothing 
seemed wanting — but to behold somewhere, sitting 
sunk in dejection, on a broken block, Michelan- 
gelo's tremendous figure of the prophet, and to 
hear, sighing in the bleak wind : " How doth the 
city sit solitary that was full of people ! How is 
she become even as a widow ! She weepeth sore 
in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks, 
Among all her lovers she hath none to comfort 
her." 

Again and again did I afterwards climb the 
Acropolis, and in warm, radiant sunshine. How 
entrancing the view over the sea to iEgina and 
Salamis, and landward over Hymettus and Pen- 
telicus, and across the plain green with the young 
wheat and gray with the olive orchards ! Over 
the wall one looks down into the amphitheatre of 
Dionysus, where zEschylus purged with terror, 
Sophocles with pity, and Aristophanes with peals 
of laughter their responsive audiences ; and yonder 
across the blue sea lies the Strait of Salamis, so 
easy to light up with the flash of the arms and 
set resounding with the war-cries of the Athenian 
and Persian fleets. All speaks, — valor, poetry, 
eloquence, wisdom. But the flower that bloomed 
full of the sap, purple and gold with the color, 
redolent of the perfume of all this outburst of 
human genius, — the Parthenon, — for all the pa- 
thetic search for the scattered petals of this con- 
summate flower of creation, one poor, baffled, 



ELEUSIS 



357 



heart-sore Isis must sadly confess that she cannot 
find and restore her slain Osiris. I look up 
through the columns at the blue sky. I see the 
sunshine flooding them; I feel the dignity and 
beauty of the wreck that remains ; but the sense 
of bereavement swallows up the sense of joy. 

^ As the deepest seas lie at the base of the 
most towering mountains, and the pro- 
foundest abysses of human tragedy at the feet of 
the most radiant summits of prosperity, so has it 
been in Grecian history. Few countries does one 
visit where the wreck of former glory is so com- 
plete, till artistically the cry is on the lips, " The 
nearer to Rome, the farther from God ! " A day 
in the Vatican or the museums of Naples and 
Florence, or in the villas surrounding Rome, and 
one lives, moves, and has his being in the atmos- 
phere of Greek art as nowhere in the land of its 
birth. Still, to see that land is one more key 
wherewith to unlock its treasures and interpret 
the nature and life out of which they grew. One 
envies the happy fellows in the American school 
at Athens, with years at free disposal to study out 
the position of every lost site, living always in the 
hope of unearthing some new miracle of beauty. 
None the less, for all their labors, the interest of 
the ruins — the Acropolis, Theseion, and a few 
other monuments excepted — is mainly archaeo- 
logical. 

One drives, for example, through the mountains 
and along the Sacred Way by the Strait of Salamis 



358 ASIA MINOR AND GREECE 



to Eleusis. The very landscape is sculpture as 
well as nature, so statuesquely outlined the moun- 
tain-shapes and so gracious the curves and recesses 
of the shores. The very severity of the scenery, 
the absence of all tropical luxuriance of foliage, is 
Doric Greek in impression. 

Then, what a site had old Eleusis, elevated just 
enough to furnish a telling platform for its temples 
and to set them in relief against the broad wheat- 
sown plains and the simple environing mountains, 
with, on the other side, the blue waters of the 
strait. The Eleusinian Mysteries, too, once cele- 
brated there, — the Ober-Ammergau Passion Play 
of Greece, — enacted, however, not by simple pea- 
sants, but by a priesthood steeped in the deepest 
mystic thought, poetry, art, and passion of Greece 
and of the Orient, — mysteries of the abysses of 
atonement, purification, redemption, in which, as 
perhaps nowhere else in Greece, the profoundest 
depths of the soul were sounded, — who has not 
had his dreams of these ? But ah ! as in our own 
far-western states, where once stood a forest of 
noble pines, their high interlacing branches a cov- 
ert for the birds and the haunt of mysterious 
beauty, so often there stands to-day but a wilder- 
ness of scarred, unsightly stumps, and the forest- 
lover moans over the ruin ; so, in Eleusis, of all 
that grove of stately temples, there remain but the 
stumps of a wilderness of columns three or four 
feet in height. So is it everywhere in Greece, go 
to Olympia or Delphi, go anywhere one will. 

Yet, benedictions on the heads of the archaeolo- 



MARATHON 



359 



gists who have dug out these temple cemeteries 
and revealed what yet remains of the ribs, verte- 
brae, and skulls of the once glorified runners and 
leapers of the palmy days of Greece. Transfigured 
" Old Mortalities " they ! in their piety keeping 
green the memories of worthies that should never 
die. In vain the callow tourist thinks to vent on 
them his private grief, with his despairing cry, 
"Son of man, can these dry bones live?" His 
eye lit with prophecy, each spade-shouldering Eze- 
kiel among them proudly answers back, " Behold, 
I will cause breath to enter into them, and they 
shall live. And I will lay sinews upon them, and 
will bring up flesh upon them and cover them with 
skin. Come from the four winds, O breath, and 
breathe upon these slain, that they may live ! " 

How much less genius is required to re- 
construct a battlefield than a Parthenon! 
One feels this in all the elation of victory when 
he drives out to Marathon. Once on the spot, 
how easy to draw up in battle array the hundred 
thousand Persians, and then, as freeborn Greeks, 
to proceed to demolish them ! Indeed, all these 
annihilating victories of a handful of hardy, disci- 
plined troops over hordes of slaves without honor 
and without hearthstones to fight for are repeti- 
tions of the same story. Clive at Plassey, in India, 
and Miltiades in Greece are one. 

In the East one learns to read the open secret. 
Not that one would pluck down Miltiades from his 
grand historical pedestal. But the excellency of 



860 ASIA MINOR AND GREECE 



the glory lies in being free men, in pride of civic 
character, in high intelligence, and obedience to 
reason's law. Given these, your hordes of slaves 
can no more stand up against them than the wheat 
stalks of the Dakota grainfields before the on- 
rolling steam-reapers. 

Yet, it was a pleasure to visit the scene of this 
ever memorable feat in the history of civilization, 
— the bare, bleak mountains, the narrow valley 
against whose sides the Greeks protected their 
flanks, the broad, swampy plain in front, the blue 
waters of the Euboean Strait in which lay the 
Persian fleet, — and there once more to ponder the 
deep-freighted lesson that the "heaviest battalion" 
does not always mean the one that will tip the 
scale in mere avoirdupois, but the one that to 
weight adds the momentum of liberty and sacrifice. 

VIII ^ Ur S * a ^ * n ^^ ens was crowned with a 
' final night of peace and reconciliation that 
will ever linger in memory. The moon was nearly 
at its full, when, at nine o'clock, my friend and I 
climbed the Acropolis. A flood of softest light 
was pouring down among the broken columns of 
the Propyhea, while the little temple of Nike Ap- 
teros stood poised on its high pedestal, a fairy 
creation of moonbeams. All stains and scars of 
time were dissolved away till there was no more 
sorrow, nor crying, neither was there any more 
pain. Peaceful as a lovely cemetery in which the 
saintly ones are sleeping lay the vast area around 
the temple, strewn with its countless, softly gleam- 



ATHENS' PARTING BENEDICTION 361 



ing blocks. Steeped in the full tide of moonlight 
hovering down upon its columns and nestling in 
their recesses, the whole eastern and southern 
sides of the Parthenon were transfigured into a 
still dream-world of light and sweetness. You 
cannot shatter dream-world. Here is a visionary- 
realm whose material is of no substance that vio- 
lence can smite and fracture. Its falling columns 
sink to the earth as gently as a drowsy child into 
its bed of down. The mind, too, is so at peace. 
No longer capable of suffering, it is translated 
into an ethereal sphere above the world of weight 
and wreck. The very yearning for perfection, 
which is the glory and the agony of human life, 
is laid to rest. One has reached Nirvana. Tears 
this night were no longer on the cheeks of discon- 
solate Pallas Athene. Her weeping was over, and 
she had lapsed into sweet, dreamless sleep. 



INDEX 



Abana, the, 340. 
Abu, Mt., 245. 
Aden, 257. 

Adullam, cave of, 326. 
Mgmsi, 352. 
Agra, 220. 
Ahmedabad, 251. 
Ajalon, valley of, 314. 
Akbar, the Great, 218. 
Amber, 241. 

Anti-Lebanon ranges, 339. 
Apis Mausoleum, 282. 
Arabia, 256. 
Asia Minor, 347. 
Atami, 42. 
Athens, 354. 

Baalbec, 338. 
Benares, 186. 
Bethlehem, 322. 
Beyrout, 335. 

Buddhism, in Japan, 48 ; in 
Thibet, 171. 

Cairo, 272. 
Calcutta, 165, 180. 
Canton, 116. 
Canton River, 113. 
Cawnpore, 199. 
Ceylon, 148. 

Cheops, pyramid of, 273. 
Cherith, Brook, 331. 
China, 97. 
China Sea, 97. 
Chinese conservatism, 98. 
Confucius, 128. 

Daibutsu, the, 28. 
Damascus, 166, 169. 
Darjeeling, 339. 
Dead Sea, 332. 
Delhi, 232. 
Denderah, 305. 
Desaix, 163. 
Desert, the, 255. 



Egypt, 255. 

Egyptian temples, 302. 
Egyptian tombs, 284. 
Eleusis, 358. 
Enoshima, 35. 
Everest, Mt., 166, 174. 

Ferozabad, 236. 
Forty-Seven Ronins, the, 68. 
Fujisan, 10. 

Ganges, the, 165, 186. 
Gizeh, pyramids of, 273. 

Hachiman. temple of, 28. 

Hakone lake, 42. 

Hermon, Mt., 338. 

Himalayas, 166. 

Hindu architecture, 251. 

Holy Sepulchre, Church of, 321. 

Hong Kong, 110. 

Hoogly, the, 165. 

Idzu, 42, 46. 
India, 163. 
Indrapat, 236. 
Ismailia, 262. 

Jaffa, 310. 

Jain temples, 245. 

Japan, 13. 

Japanese architecture, 58. 
art, 72. 
beUs, 60. m 

characteristics of, 38. 

civilization, 58. 

crusading spirit, 89. 

manners, 63. 

missions, 82. 

moral standards, 68. 

smile, 20. 

temples, 56. 

women, 18. 
Jasmine Tower, the, 224. 
Jericho, 329. 



364 



INDEX 



Jerusalem, 313. 
Jeypore, 238. 
Jinrikishas, 36. 
Jordan, the, 333. 

Kamakura, 27. 
Kamakura Buddha, the, 30. 
Kandy, 152. 
Karnak, temple of, 308. 
Kinehinjanga, 166, 174. 
Kurnah, temple of, 310. 
Kutb Minar, the, 235. 
Kyoto, Nijo Palace in, 75. 

Lebanon ranges, 337. 
Lucknow, 196. 
Luxor, temple of, 304. 

Madras, 163. 

Malagawa Buddhist temple, 153, 
159. 

Marathon, 359. 
Mariette, 281. 
Medinet Habu, 308. 
Memnon, statues of, 308. 
Memphis, 279. 
Miyanoshita, 44, 46. 
Moab, mountains of, 331. 
Mogul dynasty, 217. 
Mohammed, 257. 
Mohammedanism, 340. 

Nagasaki, 97. 

Nijo Palace in Kyoto, 75. 

Nikko, 48. 

Nile, the, 269. 

Olives, Mount of, 314. 
Orang-utan, the, 144. 

Palestine, 309. 
Parthenon, the, 353. 
Pearl Mosque, the, 227. 
Peradeniya Botanical Gardens, 
158. 



Piraeus, the, 352. 
Pisgah, 331. 
Pondicherry, 163. 
Port Said, 309. 

Quannon, temple of, 28. 

Ramesseum, the, 310. 
Red Sea, 256. 
Rocky Mountains, 4. 

Sagami Bay, 28. 
Sakkarah, 277. 

Saracenic architecture in India* 

221. 
Sati, 182. 
Senchal, 176. 
Serapeum, the, 282. 
Shamien, the, 117. 
Shanghai, 97, 101. 
Shintoism, 87. 
Sikkim, 166. 
Silliguri, 166. 
Singapore, 137. 
Smyrna, 348. 
St. Paul, Minnesota, 3. 
Sthora, 339. 
Suez, 260. 
Sunium, 351. 

Taj Mahal, the, 227. 
Ten Province Pass, 42, 46. 
Thi, Tomb of, 282. 
Thibet, 168. 
Tiger Hill, 176. 
Tokyo, University of, 89. 
Tropics, the, 135. 
Tughlakabad, 234. 

Wusung, 101. 

Yang-tse-Kiang River, 101. 
Yokohama, 15. 
Yokohama bay, 10. 
Yumoto, 42. 



QBoo60 of Crafcel* 



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Thoroughly fascinating, model travel-sketches. — Hartford Courant. 

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Delightful sketches of Portsmouth, N. H. 

Alice M. Bacon. 

Japanese Girls and Women. i6mo, $1.25. 
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Miss Bacon has had unusual opportunities to see and understand her Japanese 
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Two Dooks of much value about two countries of great but 
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BOOKS OF TRAVEL. 



Lafcadio Hearn. 

Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan. 2 vols. 8vo, gilt 
top, $4.00. 

Mr. Hearn has succeeded in photographing, as it were, the Japanese soul. — New 
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Percival Lowell. 

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021 641 948 



